Drupal social publishing software

Drupal is a powerful content management system and framework that makes building powerful websites possible for mere mortals. Some of the posts here will be syndicated to Drupal planet.

Drupal best practices

April 18, 2005

I've been giving talks and demos recently of Drupal. There is a best practices guide on the Drupal website but it does not cover some of the things I'd like to figure out.

I've come up with a very nice setup that uses DNS wildcards to send all traffic for a domain (and any sub-domain) to a given server. Apache is then configured to pass it all to Drupal. The enhanced sites functionality in 4.6 is great. Almost. It allows a great deal of flexibility, but there is a database sync issue. I want to give a blank database to each person who signs up for a site. But, I want to give more than the skeleton modules. This isn't too bad to setup one "skeleton" database and copy it each time a new request is made.

Until it comes to updates. Now I've got 100 databases with content in them and an upgrade comes along. Now it is time to upgrade all the databases. Or a new module comes out and we want to use it. So either each database has to be updated or the installation has to be frozen for long periods of time.

Another area I'm working on, in part because of the lousy satellite internet, is synching multiple Drupal installations. For speed and sanity reasons I want to do the editing of templates and most content locally and then have it sync to the central installation(s) of Drupal. No sleep for the weary!

In transition still....

April 17, 2005

All and all, the upgrade to Drupal 4.6 has gone well. I have a glitch in the theme I usually use so this one will do for a while. A few quirks to work out and complete the moves.... I still need to figure out what to do about comment Spam. Dave Winer released a solution the other day but it doesn't solve the problem. Drupal's module prevents the spam from being posted. The wasted bandwidth and cleanup of the database isn't worth the hassle.

Now on to moving email servers...

Move and upgrade

April 15, 2005

You're looking at this post which means you're seeing the new and improved Adding Understanding. We've moved to our permeant home for the next several years and upgraded to Drupal 4.6.

So far the only major stumbling block has been the lack of Network Solutions site working. For the last several hours a successful login is met with "We're sorry but we cannot process your request at this time. Please try again or select from the options below." Of course the options below will allow me to register new domains with them.... yeah... I'm likely to do that. I'll likely try Register Fly for the next bout. It had been a toss up between Register Fly and Go Daddy but Register Fly includes DNS and Go Daddy doesn't. Easy choice.

20K

April 11, 2005

Late last week I changed the settings on this site to require a login to post comments. In the days since 20,000 fewer comment spam postings have been submitted each day. Sadly the Drupal folks are going to have to do something drastic quickly to allow comment posting while preventing the time-wasters. There are still plenty of trackback spam posted each day, something for later this week.

Posting pictures with stories

February 27, 2005

To post pictures with a story follow this procedure:

  1. Click on the button labeled Choose File in the Attachments box near the bottom of the page
  2. Select the file you want to upload from your disk.
  3. Click "Choose" (May say OK or some other option in different web browsers). The name of the file you are about to upload should be next to the button labeled Choose File.
  4. Click on the Attach File button
  5. Compose your post and add as many additional pictures as desired using the method above. Note: No pictures are saved until your post is saved.

Your pictures will appear as attachments in a list at the bottom of your post, like the three pictures attached to this post.

Goodbye trackback spam

February 23, 2005

Regular readers may have noticed a plethora of trackback spam over the past few days. The flow should be stemmed and all back to normal. There is no need to have trackbacks per se but I like it. The problem lies in the trackback module's implementation of trackbacks as comments. They are automatically put in as published comments regardless of other settings (including the excellent spam system). By changing line 26 from:

$cid, $node->nid, 0, 0, $subject, $trackback->excerpt, variable_get('filter_default_format', 1), getenv("REMOTE_ADDR"), time(), 0, 0, '', $thread, $trackback_author, $trackback->url);

to:

$cid, $node->nid, 0, 0, $subject, $trackback->excerpt, variable_get('filter_default_format', 1), getenv("REMOTE_ADDR"), time(), 1, 0, '', $thread, $trackback_author, $trackback->url);

(It is the change of the 0 following time() to a 1 that does the trick. All trackbacks will now be put in moderation and only those you choose to publish will appear.)

DirecWay and XML-RPC

February 11, 2005

Last month I posted about DirecWay problems with MarsEdit. It occurred to me today that the problem may instead lie with the way DirecWay does "Web Acceleration" and that it could be interfering with the XML-RPC calls.

A quick search reveals that this indeed seems to be Direcway XML-RPC problem. The author of the WordPress article suggests it is related to latency. I'm not certain as it was working for me at one point over the satellite connection. I noticed, however, a problem with DirecWay's cache last night. At one point it attempted to load this site and munged the .css files associated with it. From then the only way I could load the site was to power-cycle the DirecWay box and load it before the Web Acceleration kicked in.

So I called Ground Control tech support and they say there is nothing that can be done. They recommend contacting the author of the software to have the problem with their system fixed.

Pages

Subscribe to Joshua Brauer: All Drupal items