Drupal

Last night, I was up late doing some administrative work for my sites as well as writing some posts. This was my attempt to procrastinate working on an osCommerce site that I promised someone would be done by the start of October.

A few months ago, I posted that I use Akismet in both Drupal and Wordpress. Akismet is a spam filtering service that can be used in content management systems via plug-ins and modules. The Akismet plugin ships with Wordpress 2, but some setup is required.

I have been keeping an eye lately on two version control systems, Subversion (SVN) and Concurrent Versions System (CVS). My sudden interest in version control is due to a project team I'm on for my organization. The team is in the early phases of project management and needing to pick either CVS or SVN. At this time we are leaning toward SVN.

As some of you may have noticed, I returned a few days ago from my low-tech week. It's taking me awhile to adjust being stuck at the computer so you'll have to bear with me. It's been tough enough to spend the PC time at work, so spending my "free time" on the PC is challenging. It's kind of like not eating fast food for a week and then suddenly having to ingest it for every meal. Drupal addict and Yoga for Geeks guru, Sarah Pullman, mentioned a similar experience in one of her posts. To add insult to injury, I blew up three sites on my VPS and had to put the pieces back together.

Last month, it was announced that Drupal will have an installer included in the next major release of Drupal. The installer will not only automate the creation of the required Drupal database tables for you, but should also allow for the creation of "install profiles".

However, this patch is more than just usability: it supports "install profiles" so that anyone can create a distribution out of Drupal core, contributed modules, and themes. This will begin a new era in Drupal's life. Without a doubt, there will be a Drupal for blogger distribution, and a forum distribution is already in the works. Also, new installations of Drupal will only contain database tables for the modules you've actually enabled.

While the announcement of this installer was last month, I really have not had much time to actually check how the installer will actually work. While I would expect the installer to work as easily as installers in other content management systems, I've learned over the years to not count my chickens before they hatch. Today, someone has posted a very good article on what Drupal users can expect in the next major update of their application.

A sleepless night for Earl Miles late last week provided the Drupal community a replacement to his Dashboard module. Earl Miles announced a successor to Dashboard at his site, Angry Donuts. The new module is the Panels module and I expect we'll be seeing it used a lot by Drupal's users, especially newcomers of Drupal and those less inclined to dig into the PHP code.

Dashboard the previous module, allowed Drupal developers an easy way to implement "simple" two-column layouts of content (called nodes in Drupal) that are not sidebars. While you can put blocks about anywhere in Drupal, the core doesn't offer an easy way to put content outside the "main body". While dashboard overcame the "single column" for content obstacle, it required knowledge of PHP to implement.

Does Drupal make the grade? The answer to that question evidently depends on who you ask. Last week, the Tech Republic posted a review by Justin James on the Drupal content management system. Mr. James concluded that "Overall, Drupal does not make the grade". This week the Drupal community is all a buzz over the decision for IBM's developerWorks to use Drupal for designing, developing, and deploying a collaborative Website.

Something old is new again. The Blue_mark theme for Drupal 4.7 is available at CMS Report. The Blue_mark theme uses Drupal 4.7's default theming engine, PHPTemplate. This theme is released under the GPL.

The Blue_mark theme was originally offered by Charles Lowe and available for download at his site, cyberdash.com. The original theme was written for Drupal 4.4's Xtemplate theme engine. I maintained the theme through Drupal 4.6 for a personal site of mine. With the switchover to the PHPTemplate theme engine as the Drupal 4.7 defualt, significant work was needed to keep old Blue_mark alive. The Blue Marine theme was used as a starting point. Minor tweaks were made to Blue Marine's PHP files and significant changes were made in the CSS.

A post by Nick Lewis, Drupal and XML: Looking Forward, caught my attention. In his post he discusses work on developing the CAP XML format (Common Alerting Protocol).

In preparation for my /Nick Lewis/ trip to Washington D.C. next month, I’ve begun to develop a module that integrates the CAP XML format (Common Alerting Protocol) with drupal’s node, location, google map, category, and CCK modules.

Put plainly, the CAP format seeks:

A very common question among users of Drupal is, "How do I upgrade to the latest version of Drupal?" Drupal releases often contain instructions for how to upgrade your site from a previous release of Drupal (for example, 4.6 to 4.7), but quite a bit of confusion remains for updrading from much older releases (such as 4.3 to 4.7). The folks at 2bits offer some advice on how best to update your Drupal site in their post, Upgrading From Old pre-4.6 Drupal Releases To 4.7. The post is short yet helpful in getting you started on a Drupal update.