Drupal

On Saturday night I decided to update my Drupal install and ran into some issues, which has meant some additional learning and rebuilding before I can get it back online. Every time you update either Drupal core or it's modules it's a good idea to manually run cron as some updates need to make changes to the database schema. I did this and had to learn some lessons the hard way.

I've been spending a few days immersed in the wonderful world of Drupal and something rather basic struck me. Drupal is an excellent piece of software. While it's intimidating at first, it's actually well designed after you get passed the initial hump. For end users Drupal is very easy to use when the site is set up. So why leave a rather obvious usability hump in peoples paths when they go to install it?

Up until about a week ago I've jumped from one free host to another with mixed results. After prolonged periods of downtime I decided to jump once and for all to a paid host. Free hosting is perfectly workable if you know the limits and are prepared to juggle different accounts for different things. My new host is not only capable of having the site accessible 24 / 7 but gives me much more freedom to really start to work.

Many powerful and rich organisations have buisness dealings they'd rather keep secret, often illegal dealings. They will seek to derail, disrupt and slander anyone who dares expose those dealings. They will of course act through proxies. After reading this post tonight, it gave me an idea of something we've been lacking as a module / plugin for software like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, an anti-astroturfer module. First let's look at the state of play between the astroturfer and the website administrator.

When I create thought out content like a blog entry I like to be neat. I like to check there are no typos etc. I also like to create my posts in a WYSIWYG editor too, it's just easier. I found that doing this in Drupal is not quite as easy as it should be; it requires additional modules. Last night I stumbled on an easy way.

When I switched from Wordpress to Drupal, one of the changes I didn't really think about at the time was the WordPress ability to put the date into the URL automatically. Drupal creates nodes for each piece of content by default.

As the site grows, I'll run out of titles unless I plan for that growth. I've been looking for a module that will do that function automatically but can't find one, so I've decided to work my way through each post and manually change them. After the backlog is done, it'll just be a case of remembering to set each one as I post, which won't be a problem as I already do that, it'll just be a little bit different.

A few days ago I realised I had a problem. A blog post I had just written kept replacing my content with an iframe. With a bit of help it looked like the server I was using had been hacked. This made me rethink the choice of host as I wasn't all that happy with them even before that. It also had another side effect of making me rethink the software i chose to use for this site.

I've decided to refresh my blog with a new theme. I'm still getting to grips with it's features. I've found out how to add images to the previews, but as I have none planned it looks a little bare right now. I'm going to try and prepare some for the categories, but that'll happen gradually I guess. Making images wasn't the plan behind the blog after all, it's just the finishing touches.