Drupal social publishing software

Drupal is a powerful content management system and framework that makes building powerful websites possible for mere mortals. Some of the posts here will be syndicated to Drupal planet.

Posting pictures with stories

February 27, 2005

To post pictures with a story follow this procedure:

  1. Click on the button labeled Choose File in the Attachments box near the bottom of the page
  2. Select the file you want to upload from your disk.
  3. Click "Choose" (May say OK or some other option in different web browsers). The name of the file you are about to upload should be next to the button labeled Choose File.
  4. Click on the Attach File button
  5. Compose your post and add as many additional pictures as desired using the method above. Note: No pictures are saved until your post is saved.

Your pictures will appear as attachments in a list at the bottom of your post, like the three pictures attached to this post.

Goodbye trackback spam

February 23, 2005

Regular readers may have noticed a plethora of trackback spam over the past few days. The flow should be stemmed and all back to normal. There is no need to have trackbacks per se but I like it. The problem lies in the trackback module's implementation of trackbacks as comments. They are automatically put in as published comments regardless of other settings (including the excellent spam system). By changing line 26 from:

$cid, $node->nid, 0, 0, $subject, $trackback->excerpt, variable_get('filter_default_format', 1), getenv("REMOTE_ADDR"), time(), 0, 0, '', $thread, $trackback_author, $trackback->url);

to:

$cid, $node->nid, 0, 0, $subject, $trackback->excerpt, variable_get('filter_default_format', 1), getenv("REMOTE_ADDR"), time(), 1, 0, '', $thread, $trackback_author, $trackback->url);

(It is the change of the 0 following time() to a 1 that does the trick. All trackbacks will now be put in moderation and only those you choose to publish will appear.)

DirecWay and XML-RPC

February 11, 2005

Last month I posted about DirecWay problems with MarsEdit. It occurred to me today that the problem may instead lie with the way DirecWay does "Web Acceleration" and that it could be interfering with the XML-RPC calls.

A quick search reveals that this indeed seems to be Direcway XML-RPC problem. The author of the WordPress article suggests it is related to latency. I'm not certain as it was working for me at one point over the satellite connection. I noticed, however, a problem with DirecWay's cache last night. At one point it attempted to load this site and munged the .css files associated with it. From then the only way I could load the site was to power-cycle the DirecWay box and load it before the Web Acceleration kicked in.

So I called Ground Control tech support and they say there is nothing that can be done. They recommend contacting the author of the software to have the problem with their system fixed.

Drupal 4.5.2 Upgrade

January 17, 2005

Drupal is out with its 4.5.2 upgrade. It is a very simple upgrade and I had zero problems. Checking the changelog reveals Drupal is now four years and two days old (based on the 1.0 date of January 15, 2001). Happy birthday Drupal! Those of us using it are looking forward to several more great years.

Later today I will likely write a little more about Ranchero Software's Mars Edit which I've been using the last couple of days. Great software. Drupal users have to tell it to use Movable Type settings to get all the extras to work.

Update Looking at a post on the Drupal site it seems tracker isn't working. The tracker module has two changes of significance. Lines 70 and 73 have added 'AND c.status = 0' to the SQL statement. Removing that statement restores previous tracker behavior. What does it break?

Drupal rocks when it comes to content spam

December 13, 2004

Once again Drupal is kicking ass and taking names. The Spam module for Drupal is superb at recognizing and kicking out spam comments. Over the last 24 hours this site has been hit by the online casino folks thousands of times. Now the comments they leave go merily away into ether. How long till they figure out it doesn't work? Who knows.

Why is Drupal missing?

November 27, 2004

I was cleaning up bookmarks and came across OpenSource CMS. Interestingly there is no mention of Drupal on their site. Why would that be? It is widely used and seems to be one of the most robust Open Source CMS solutions available.

Blogging tools

November 17, 2004

I was reminded when looking at Joe Trippi's Drupal site of a podcast from BloggerCon III this weekend. Scoble was leading a session and there was a great deal of discussion of categories. Drupal makes categories so simple and everybody can easily subscribe to the man feed or any category they want. Can't decide which category to put something in, it doesn't matter. It can easily go in more than one.

Upgrade time

November 4, 2004

It will be a busy few weeks here, but we got it kicked off with an upgrade to Drupal 4.5.0. Very nice and a smooth upgrade so far. There are a couple of gremlins that need zapping (probably to do with my theme).

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