gf-tech.com

I got a new geek book recently: Pro Drupal Development.

I've written a couple modules that I use on my various sites to display comments in a certain way, and to display past articles posted on the current day. I managed to get those modules to work, but just barely. Each new Drupal release meant I had to re-jig things to get them working properly, but I never understood why things worked.

I bought the book on a whim and so far I am really enjoying it. I am learning a lot about Drupal and how it was architected, how it works, and what I can do with it, and I am only in chapter 4.

Reading the book is also giving me ideas about my modules, how I can write them better, and what new features I can add to them. Now I just need to find some time to sit down and write my module.

While running WireShark I did a follow up post to one of my sites using ScribeFire. Something I learned was that it seems like ScribeFire is doing the right thing.

A portion of the capture:

<value>
<dateTime.iso8601>20080828T16:10:48Z</dateTime.iso8601>
</value>

This means that Drupal may not be handling this correctly. For a while I allowed users to choose their own timezone. I changed my profile to be a little different than the site setting. I thought maybe that would be causing the problem, but I changed the db to revert it back. This had no change.

More investigation needed before I can file a bug report.

This site is running the latest release of Drupal. This version is just a release candidate still, but so far I haven't seen much that is too different. The default theme looks the same, and most of the management screens I have seen look the same.

I did notice that the configuration of the categories had a really nice change. The individual categories can be reorganized by a drag and drop method. Very slick. A lot nicer than choosing the weight using a drop down list.

OpenID is integrated into this version which doesn't help too many people right now, but in the future this will be a nice way to stop having to create a new account at every site you visit.

So far so good. I have encountered a couple bugs which is typical of a release candidate, but on the whole it seems pretty stable.

Just upgraded gf-tech to Drupal 4.7-RC2 to play with it a bit.

The upgrade from 4.6.6 wasn't as smooth as I would like. There were a few DB upgrade issues. One was easy to ignore (Drupal trying to duplicate an alias I had already set up), one was easy to fix (dropping a table column), but the third I can't figure out what it should result in.

ALTER TABLE book ADD KEY nid (nid)

My book table has a primary key on a column named vid. Am I supposed to drop that key and add this one? I had previously turned off the book module. Re-enabling it I can still view the contained content with no errors. I will read up on this later. If I can't figure it out I can always do a throw away install to see what the table should look like in the end, and make mine match.

What do I think of the new install. So far everything feels familiar. The upgrade had some sweet ajaxy goodness when performing the DB upgrades. Nice to see a progress meter when things are working.

Now I am seeing more DHTML options for composing posts. Not bad. I'll have to see if there are settings to keep these expanded all the time.

My theme broke and that sucks. For me that is the biggest pain in the ass for upgrading. Re-working themes can take a lot of time I can't devote right now.

So far so good. More play time is needed though.

I have been using Drupal for quite a while now and for the most part I like love it. It is a geeks CMS, specifically for programmers (IMO). That is part of the appeal for me I guess.

One of the things I have been most impressed with is the extensibility. Adding new modules is relatively easy. I say relatively since the site admin still will need to run a sql script to create the table structures. That is a big drawback sometimes. Why?

Well, another feature is that a site admin can set Drupal up to use a table prefix. This would allow multiple websites (perhaps not all Drupal) to run on one database. Installing a module that requires a sql script to update the database, also requires the site admin to manually update the scripts. Quite a pain.