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Drupal content management system.
Wed, 2006-05-31 14:37 — PMunn
I recently came across a new version announcement for the Drupal content management system. It's a PHP-based open source system supporting both mysql and postgresql database management systems, and the recent feature lists and number of add-on modules available intrigued me.
Add in a documented API, the ability to write PHP code directly into certain parts of modules to otherwise implement custom features, and a very impressive pedigree of sites that currently run it, and I was very interested in learning it.
I've installed it in a test environment to try and learn how it thinks of and sees the world. So far I'm seeing a lot of power and potential in the system, but I'm in the early stages of learning how to do what I want with it, and how to adjust my ideas of what I want to fit how it does things.
I have three uses in mind for Drupal based on what I learn from this sandbox copy of it.
1. PaulMunn.com
The first is my name domain which is currently showing a simple logo and mailto link. If I start doing consulting again sometime soon, that name site will be important to me, and since I've seen a number of consultants online pitching Drupal customization services and Drupal packages for any number of clients on consulting jobs, it couldn't hurt to learn Drupal and build my "corporate" site with it. Anything looks better than what I have there now.
2. Farbot.com
We're coming up on four years since the last redesign of farbot.com -- a veritable eternity in web design years -- and even when it was new it was simplistic and the color scheme was poor at best.
The most-used feature of the site is the phpbb forum. I really like the forum a lot. Its compact layout, clean interface, strong feature set, and frequent security updates keep it focused and on-point as a forum system.
The Drupal system in use at GamersWithJobs is something akin to what I'd use Drupal for on farbot.com. You can see this if you click the title of a front page article over at GWJ. The articles actually reside in the forums, and they are moderated and promoted to the front page for publication. There is a module for importing phpbb forum data, so that's not a problem -- the posts and history would be preserved and carried over. The trick is to find the right blocks and modules for the front page which would let users see what the current posts are and also have a blog-like front end for promoting new articles and posts.
With luck it would be powerful enough to let everyone who posts on their favorite topics here or their own blogs be able to find a home back here talking about / teaching us about the things they like so much.
3. Work
I also have a work-related use for the system. I'm looking to test drive some programmable portal technologies for our customer-facing web portal in use by field employees, and Drupal looks like it might be a good candidate to replace an aging web portal in use by various projects. Our in-house IT crew, which I am not part of (I'm a project manager) is definitely NOT looking at Drupal. They're hung up on Microsoft Sharepoint and are a slave to its tight MSOffice integration. They're trying to hammer every nail with it -- in-house collaboration as well as in-the-field web portal needs -- but I'm less than impressed with its web-friendliness. It can do the job, but I doubt they'll be able to make it do what I need it to within the next two years or so.
Ok ok, so what do you think so far?
1. PaulMunn:
I'll be migrating some of the farbot content outside of phpbb to my home site as a promotional demonstration of technical knowledge. Things like my how-to's on some of the more esoteric things I've done with Linux. Here I'm having problems wrapping my head around how to categorize articles effectively and then set up usable navigation systems to get to them.
While I could throw all articles into the forum, I lose the ability to categorize them with various terms for easy searching or navigation across the category tree. Plus having them in a forum kind of defeats the wiki-ish nature of the content. I'm still in a learning mode with this.
2. Farbot:
The farbot copy of drupal would import the phpbb data and user base as a starting point. After that, it would take on a more blog-like UI with forum articles submitted for posting on the front page. I'd want to put up blocks to show current/active posts to mimic what the front page does now. I don't see much of anything on farbot that isn't doable right now with drupal and a little bit of digging.
New features I've wanted to add are much more likely under a popular CMS like Drupal. User uploads and downloads, and the gaming database listing searchable game features and game progress tracking like I tend to do in my forum signature are possible with its API.
3. Work:
There's a module called organic groups which allows the assignment of content to user groups. This module is incompatible with postgresql, but a newly patched version is nearly finished. I've volunteered to test it and work on it for them to get this critical ability into drupal for my database back-end, but haven't heard back from the developers yet. It's a very popular module, and in my case would be necessary for me to set up multiple client projects on the system that wouldn't see each others' content.
phpBB to Drupal conversion working
I've spent the last few nights digging into the phpbb2drupal module code in a big way. I'd set up scripts to reload my databases to pre-execution levels after each fix, ensuring easy testing.
Four orphaned topics
During testing I found just four orphaned topics, which was neat. These topics were basically double posted to the database when something else went wrong and whoever was posting posted again.
Poll importing fails
The only part of the module that doesn't work is importing polls. Since this site has had only two polls throughout its entire life in phpBB, this is not a big deal. The error it generates is a key violation error, making me wonder why it's trying to write the same records in twice. Someone else can test that.
Attachments?
The other part of the module I haven't tested involves attachments. I don't have an attachments mod for phpBB since it's not part of the core system, so I didn't need it, so I didn't test it on my system. Someone else can test this too.
Private Messages
I might need to retest things relative to private messages since I think there weren't any in the system. The private messages import didn't seem to do anything.
bbcode
The only thing left for me to figure out is why my test system isn't interpreting the bbcode when showing the forum entries. I'm seeing the bracketed bbcode in the posts and comments instead of what their net effect should be. I've turned on everything the documentation says to turn on to have it be interpreted, so this is a surprise to me.
Next steps
My next step is to install a blank drupal database on my sandbox site, set up all the modules for the import, create another set of backups for the script to easily restore, and then see if the module can create the temporary tables it needs in the drupal database properly on its own. This is something other users commented didn't work, but the table syntax was incompatible with PostgreSQL at the time. My new, compatible syntax should work, but we shall see.
Machete + 2 vs. Mysql
Drupal: MySQL vs. PostgreSQL
I've been hacking away at Drupal on and off over the past four months now, attacking modules with nonstandard SQL and php code that work fine in MySQL, but not PostgreSQL.
More and more I'm noticing and not enjoying the minority status PostgreSQL has in the development universe despite its superior standards compliance and much-lauded engine strength. It's no accident that the M in LAMP is MySQL.
Farbot Forum -> Drupal sometime soon
Anyway, what keeps this post from being about development and not this site is this: I'm hacking away at the module that allows import of the phpbb forum data and users into Drupal to get it to work with postgreSQL. With luck the patches I provide will be received reasonably well by the Drupal folks, tested for me, and admitted. I've already had a few fixes / patches for other modules accepted, and it's a nice feeling to have your work move a project forward, especially one as powerful as this.
If I can get the module working I plan to pull the entire forum over to drupal and use drupal to run farbot.com (as well as other domains), if only in a test environment to see how it works with your input while keeping the live forum up and running (and out of sync). If it works out well, then I can always re-transform the forum data across.
Want your own blog?
There's a lot of power in the drupal engine, as I probably mentioned before. Clever programmers have done a number of things that might be of interest to you. Namely, one code base of drupal can run multiple sites . Basically copy the configuration folder in the sites folder, edit it to point to a new blank drupal database and have a new name, set up Apache to route to the new name, and bingo, you have a brand new drupal site.
Of course I have a dev codebase and live codebase, so I expect to tinker and add new features to the dev system, have me and others test them out, then roll them to live.
PaulMunn.com
My development is currently going on in subdomains of this domain, and I'm leaving my .com site alone for now, pointing to my farbot.com web mail form.
Work
I don't think it's going to work out for Drupal at work. It's so hard for me in my position to get any IT resources for even routine things that I think they'd freak out if I asked for a server to run drupal site(s) on.
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