An overeager antispam filter appears to have eaten all my comments data. I've restored from a recent backup, but a couple of notes are missing (from Jay Small and Howard Owens, if I remember correctly.)
While I was at it, I upgraded to the new Drupal 5 codebase. It's beta 1, so there may be some surprises.
And I switched from my own design to Drupal's new default theme, which I like a lot. I've been preaching a lot lately how "pride of authorship goeth before a fall." We all have to learn to embrace other people's work -- both content and technology. With that in mind, the design switch seemed appropriate. I actually wrote my own weblog software -- based on forum software I had written years previously. I switched to Drupal early last year.
For the time being, all comments will require my approval before they go live, due to abuses by blog spammers.
Comments
Hmm...
Dude, you trying to tell me something? :-) New site looks good!
Software, modules, etc.
Steve,
I'm curious what Drupal modules you have installed on your site. Please share!
Drupal 5.0, beta 1
This site is pretty much stock Drupal 5.0, beta 1, with just two contributed modules: tagadelic (which produces the tag cloud) and adminblock (helps me find comments that need to be looked at). I had to modify tagadelic for 5.0. Very few contributed modules have been upgraded at this point.
The new Drupal has an auto-installer, very cool distributed authentication, completely revised administrative controls, and subtle integration of Ajax. There's a color control module that lets you dial up a color scheme for the default template set.
At work we're running 4.7x on most of our installations, typically adding a number of modules, including mysite (personalization, developed at Morris), buddylist, private messaging, etc. The undoubtedly coolest modules are nodequeue and views, which make it point-click easy to create automated or editorially managed list-driven pages, and the Content Construction Kit, which lets you create new structured content types without coding.
Right now I'm examining a collaborative-filtering recommendation module, funded as part of the Google Summer of Code project, to see how it will apply to the local directory concept.
Ken Rickard and Nik Wilets are working on a political site -- won't make the cut for this election (!!) but it will be cool. It combines aggregation, commentary, some Wiki functionality, ranking/ratings and some databases of legislative activities. Drupal on LAMP is pulling data from Postgres/PERL through a REST API, dynamically creating Drupal nodes as necessary. It's partially a demonstation of non-monolithic, mashup-friendly thinking about content.
Drupal 5
I downloaded Drupal 5, but was unable to find many modules for it so I backed up to 4.7. THe number and quality of modules is simply amazing. It's scary what I've been able to set up in basically 1 day.
Thanks again for preaching the gospel on this product.
Very early beta
Yeah, I would not recommend Drupal 5 for general deployment. I'm just enjoying living on the edge.
It will probably be three months before the center of gravity is fully shifted to the new platform in Drupal. There are, as you noted, a lot of modules that need to be ported/tested, and there are quite a few changes in the underlying API.
Drupal philosophy is to have no loyalty to the past -- in a code sense. Data should be preserved and upgraded as the platform changes, but if it makes sense to throw out an entire approach to coding, they'll do it.
Bluffton home page, etc.
I'd be curious to learn how you developed the home page for Bluffton Today SavannahNow, etc. Are those views in Drupal? Custom module? Or is it outside the framework?
Views + nodequeue
The views and nodequeue modules, working together, are great.
Bluffton's homepage is generated by the front page module; the template pulls in several components, including some views (primary and secondary blog clusters, events), some remote XML (from Spotted), and six avatars representing users randomly chosen from those who have been active recently.
In all cases, for performance reasons, the snippet is cached in the database and recalculated only periodically, not on every pageview. That's very easy with the Drupal cache API.
Savannah is somewhat different; it is an older codebase and has quite a bit of custom code (not using the views module), but it also relies on nodequeue heavily for site management. The producers love it. Point, click, assign/promote.