Another weekend with Drupal 6
Yesterday evening, I spent about two hours updating my site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 RC 4 for another weekend test at my site. About 30 minutes was spent backing up the site and installing Drupal 6. The rest of my time was spent with tweaking things via Drupal's admin menus as well as looking at the contributed modules and themes available for D6. I'm currently using the Salamander theme and only two contributed modules, Image and CAPTCHA. I also spent some time placing snippets of PHP code in my blocks to replace many of the functions I was doing with Views. The end result is that with only two hours of work, I am just fine running CMSReport.com on Drupal 6
As I said last week, it's amazing how many people overlook the power of Drupal...even without its contributed modules. Yes, I'll be glad when the Views, Panels, and even the TinyMCE contributed modules are ready to use with Drupal 6. But I've always looked at contributed modules as modules of convenience and not necessity. I'm convinced that most people do not have to wait for Views to move onto Drupal 6. Views only automated a number of SQL tasks that can easily be done with PHP. Some Drupal users are going to object when I say it is "easy" because they are not PHP developers, but you know what, I'm not a PHP developer either. In fact, I'm kind of slow, but I seem to manage along just fine with D6.
As usual during this period of the development process, people are wondering if the new version of Drupal is ready to be released or if there will be another release candidate. Whether this is the last release candidate or not for Drupal 6 I'm not sure anyone can really say. All I will say is Drupal 6 feels ready to me.
Updated: 1:56 PM CST February 10, 2008
Really no issues to report with this install of Drupal 5. I have seen some issues though with 5.x contributed modules removed from prior to the install, not fully properly uninstalling. See this in the forms of links in the menus, admin menus, and referenced in some other place. Luckily the contributed modules are getting better all the time. For example, the developer of the adsense module just improved the uninstall in a new version of the adsense module. What perfect timing!
Updated: 1:56 PM CST February 10, 2008
CMS Report is back on Drupal 5 (and also on a new server). It's actually more work transferring the posts/comments from the Drupal 6 install back to Drupal 5 site. I think this will likely by my last test with expectations in the next two week that my next upgrade to D6 will be permanent. Hooray for Drupal.
FCKeditor works with Drupal 6
WYSIWYG for Drupal 6
Notes on hand built Views
Not much to show
There isn't much to show and most of what I use are snippets of code found in Drupal's handbooks.
For example for the "Latest CMS News Reports" I include:
<?php
$num_nodes = 5;
$result = db_query_range(db_rewrite_sql('SELECT n.nid, n.title, n.type
FROM {node} n
WHERE n.status = 1 AND n.type <> "forum"
ORDER BY n.changed DESC'), 0, $num_nodes);
$output = node_title_list($result);
print $output;
?>
For the Featured Stories" block which uses a few keywords via taxonomy to know what posts are "featured":
<?php
/**
* Creates a list of node titles selected from multiple category terms
* in descending chronological order (most recent first).
* Titles link to full node.
*
* To change category terms to select from,
* edit the $taxd_id numbers, retaining the "" marks.
*
* To change the number of node titles, edit the $list_no number.
*
* This snippet is tested with Drupal 4.6.x
*
*/
$taxo_id = "10";
$list_no = 5;
$query = "SELECT DISTINCT(n.nid), n.title, n.created FROM {node} n INNER JOIN {term_node} tn ON n.nid = tn.nid WHERE tn.tid in ($taxo_id) AND n.status = 1 ORDER BY n.created DESC LIMIT $list_no";
$sql = db_rewrite_sql($query);
$result = db_query($sql);
$items = array();
while ($anode = db_fetch_object($result)) {
$items[]= l($anode->title, "node/$anode->nid");
}
if(count($items)) {
return theme('item_list',$items);
}
?>
Drupal without Contrib
I am not in a hurry to upgrade this time
But I agree that limiting modules to speed upgrading is a sound policy. My main problem is that I usually have a custom theme and that can be a headache.
I also have OpenID URL installed, but I was not able to log in to this site with my blog URL. When I was able to log in with another URL I was not real impressed with the way Drupal handled it. True enough, I am still pretty clumsy with OpenID, but I did not see a real advantage over just registering the old fashioned way.
Site looks great, Bryan. I am impressed with your handmade views. :)
XML sitemap
XML Sitemap in development
They're still working on the module, but I think some multi-language issues is holding it back. The applied patches on this thread does seem to get the module going (with someone putting it together for you): http://drupal.org/node/157533#comment-79...
Finally found a easy way to
Finally found a easy way to get google adsense with drupal 6x. If anyone is interested in adding adsense using a block, you'll want to read these instructions:
http://computerquestionhelp.com/blogs/Mi...