Adding Understanding

Andre posts about Drupal specific snippets coming with the next version of Active State's Komodo IDE. I started using Komodo after the 50 tips and tricks podcast and haven't looked back. Sure I still fire up BBedit for the odd job here and there, but for coding everything from PHP to HTML and CSS Komodo is my tool of choice these days.

With that said there is one Eclipse feature that I'm particularly jealous of. The patch handling features of Eclipse are outstanding. While the snippets will likely be handy there are already pretty simple ways of doing this using things like the module builder module or creating one's own templates in Komodo today. Perhaps some uber-patching features will be included in Komodo 4.4. Unfortunately it looks like that would be another year in the making if the past release schedule is an indication. Nevertheless Komodo will continue to be a tool that runs continuously on my computer.

Recently I've been helping a few folks convert websites from WordPress to Drupal. Presently this works for migrating to Drupal 5 so if you want a Drupal 6 site first migrate to Drupal 5 and then upgrade the site to Drupal 6.

There are a couple of different ways of approaching this task. In the distant past I've worked with wp2drupal. Those experiences are a distant enough memory that I can't speak to it one way or another. It does seem that it has been a while since that module was upgraded. On the other hand Wordpress Import is undergoing active development. One user I worked with in IRC was struggling with wp2drupal and found Wordpress Import to be very simple. Also a note that the Wordpress Import module has been updated since I've used it so some of the steps may not be necessary.

The process really couldn't be simpler. Start with an WordPress export of an extendedRSS file. With this in hand you'll need a Drupal site setup. The site can either be new or an existing site but these hints apply to using a new site. The import process is very simple you select the extendedRSS file and tell Drupal which WordPress users map to which Drupal users. With that done the data now resides in the Drupal database. Things are pretty good but there are a few tweaks that make things better. The creation time for the items has been set to the creation time from WordPress. However, the updated time is set to the time of the import. This really matters most if you have search enabled on your site. Search results show the time changed in the display.

The Drupal project today released Drupal 6.0. This latest release of the leading content management system makes managing web content easier and more powerful than ever before. Drupal 6.0 includes many great new features that improve usability, security, setup, themeing, user interfaces and just about every part of the system. Thousands of hours of testing have gone into this new release. The inclusion of many new JavaScript tools and the jQuery libraries makes administering a Drupal site easier than ever.

I've used many of the beta and release candidate versions and this is by far the most exciting release of Drupal yet. For administrators things like managing menus are so easy and beautiful that it is tempting to spend hours just moving menus around because it is so much fun. The Theme Developer module makes writing Drupal themes easier than it has ever been.

The wonderful Drupal AsSense module received a great new update tonight. Ironically one of the notes I made on the plane was to look into whether a universal patch for hiding the currently selected AdSense ID from the user profile made sense. It probably wouldn't have made much sense. Instead I came home to find out that the AdSense module now has a great API and modules can do all sorts of things. In addition there are a plethora of options for integrating with UserPoints, setting ID's by content type or taxonomy terms. All and all an outstanding piece of work.

According to the post the download will be here. Upgrading is pretty straight forward. Remove your old AsSense module and install the new one. A visit to the admin/build/modules page will reveal that you need to enable one of the two included modules, either basic or revenue-sharing.

I've been working recently on a presentation about open source software. This great upgrade will be included as a prime example of where open source and the community behind projects like Drupal make software better than many a closed-source shop.

Reading through my RSS queue this morning this set of photos sent me back to days of yore. Instantly I was transported from the modern hotel lobby to the Laser 128 sitting in my childhood home and all of the amazing things we managed to do with AppleSoft.

Part of devoting my professional undertakings to Drupal has been to begin doing some more serious module development. Thus we have a preview of the Forum Thread module. It is a module that I'm developing for a sponsor and will be releasing on Drupal.org in the next couple of weeks. The design is to take Drupal's standard forums and in the most Drupalish way possible provide threaded forums that are more similar to the traditional forum look of My Little Forum or mailman archives. Having looked at several of the existing forum solutions I didn't care for the "bolt-on" nature of the forums. It seems it should be possible to do it with native Drupal forums and without adding any additional data to the database.