Back to Drupal

27th October 2007

I have migrated this site back to Drupal. Bye, bye WordPress.

I moved the Silver Lexus theme across first, which was a very interesting exercise, but also fairly straightforward, but time consuming. Drupals theming system is very flexible and can do most things quite easily. It is therefore surprising the general lack of quality themes available “off the shelf”. My only theory is the type of user. Drupal seems to target itself more at the professional user, who is more likely to pull together their own website appearance anyway.

Conversion of the posts was very straightforward (apart from accidentally sending Twitter 200+ updates of new blog postings – oops). Comments were a little trickier since the site has been moved a few times and the comment texts were a bit of a mashup of previous comment titles mixed with comment bodies. This part I dealt with by hand.

Widgets were more of a problem, a couple were available off the shelf. A couple, I wrote my own implementation of. A couple were simple copies of the Wordpress version. And the remaining few bit the dust.

Gallery integration was so easy that I wondered why I left it to last.

I changed back because I am now doing a fair bit of Drupal freelance work, and keeping my skills razor sharp seemed a good idea. I was dallying with Yaki a novel, clean, wiki based system, but felt that becoming hot at Python and another system would not be helpful to my current goals. Nice system though, and I am using Drupals freelinking module to add a wiki style flavour to the blog.

tags: blog drupal home computing web

  • 1 On Sat, 27/10/2007 - 22:21, Alison said:

    Very nice David. It does

    Very nice David. It does look slightly different.

  • 2 On Sun, 28/10/2007 - 08:11, Mum (not verified) said:

    I cannot see any

    I cannot see any difference. When i go into my Blog I still have WordPress. What am I missing?

  • 3 On Sun, 28/10/2007 - 08:40, David said:

    Ahh, well

    My blog is now Drupal – I don’t think you would like it for your own blog. If I did my job right on this one, then it will look the same as my old Wordpress one – that was part of the exercise, improving my theme coding.

    I will be doing some stuff here later, that would have been more difficult with WordPress, but stage 1 was simply getting all the same stuff working.

  • 4 On Wed, 07/11/2007 - 18:59, KHR (not verified) said:

    Regarding your website

    Hi David,

    After a lot of googling, I think I finally found your site which I want to build myself for my family. To clear things up let me explain. I have been tinkling with Wordpress and Drupal to make the exact same type of website that you have done. So far, I have not been able to do that as I am still learning a lot with Drupal. I have min. programming experience hence the delay in learning curve. However, I have installed and ever since building my site locally in my PC. Before I go online, I have a couple of things I want to test out. I want to create separate blogs for my family members just as you have done using wordpress (because I believe for blogging wordpress is much better). I looked everywhere either for a module to fit wordpress with Drupal or something else to help with. However, I found none (or I have been looking at the wrong place). It would be great if you could tell me how to link wordpress blog to my drupal site.

    Sorry for such a long comment, but I got to say you have nailed the design part of your website. It rocks!... I hope I can make one similar too…

  • 5 On Thu, 08/11/2007 - 22:59, David said:

    Clarification...

    Hi KHR,

    I have a domain www.angier.co.uk that has on it a master page (custom, hand-written PHP) and a series of subdirectories. Each one has a different subsystem. This bit www.angier.co.uk/david is an installation of Drupal, most of the others have WordPress. There is a Gallery install too, which I have used a Drupal module, and a WordPress plugin to embed onto those sites.

    I don’t have any way of referencing WordPress pages from Drupal, or vice versa. It is theoretically possible, but I see no real value, so haven’t done it.

    I hope this explanation helps.

    Cheers,

    David

  • 6 On Thu, 20/12/2007 - 17:35, Richard Sheppard said:

    I really like this theme!

    Your site is looking very good, David! Well done!

    I'm going to be dividing my my site across three sites in the new year (maybe even before, if I stay focused enough.

    Cheers,

    Richard

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