This site is now running on Drupal 6. It was a useful exercise in finding out how much pain there would be to upgrade some of my customers sites.

The good news is that it is relatively straight-forward. But, unfortunately, contributors are being a bit slow at getting on-board with Drupal 6. This site uses a custom theme, and about 8 contributed modules.

I think it is time for Gallery to be retired from this blog. I will still keep it for Alison and Mum, but I am actively looking for alternatives for my photos. SmugMug is very nice, and looks like a good candidate.

So why? Well, although Gallery is a nice piece of software, I am getting seriously pissed off the the Drupal and Wordpress integration is ALWAYS the bit that breaks when I upgrade anything. This week I upgraded Alison to the latest Wordpress and WPG2 and her blog threw errors on every attempt to view a page only when she logged in. It was fine for me, and for non-logged in users. I traced the fault to a problem with G2’s embedded user mapping.

Next, I am working on porting this site to Drupal 6 – I do quite a bit of Drupal freelancing, and want to get up to speed with how Drupal 6 differs. My own site is good motivation to learn. But, how about Gallery integration. Oh good, there is a dev release. Oh bad, it requires Gallery 2 V2.3, which isn’t even released yet. WTF. So, the guys working on this (for nothing, I understand) think it makes sense to write the code to integrate a released Drupal 6 to an unreleased Gallery 2! I note, that ALMOST everything else is working for Drupal 6. There are some settling down issues with quite a few modules, the most inexplicable being XMLSitemap, but at least it works.

So, I think, what is it that wastes HUGE lumps of time every time I do an upgrade (and for my family, I have 6 sites). Gallery2, every time.

So, what do you think I can use as a replacement for other family members? It needs easy steps for linking a photo into Wordpress, other than that, just easy to use.

A long time ago, when the web was young, to run a personal web site you needed to edit every individual page. This was done either directly in the language of the web page (html) or using a wysiwyg editor. These pages needed individually uploading to the web server, and the links between them needed manually maintaining.

The blog came about to make this easier for quickly posting new entries. The main features of a blog are themed pages, on-web editing, a front page listing recent posts and a detailed page holding a more complete entry.

Most systems support comments, image posting, rss feeds and lots of other goodies under the hood.

Wordpress is the mot popular and can do most things out of the box. Drupal is another system I use, which can be configured as a blog, amongst other things.

Drupal is a kick-ass CMS, which can be used in too many ways to mention.

I am using it here as a blog and a wiki.

Why is Drupal so good? Because it is clean, and flexible. The code is a dream to read, and once you get inside the head of the developers you can do anything. It is a developers CMS, not a users CMS. So, if you want a site built, give Drupal to a developer, get back your site that does what you want, and then run it yourself.

I also do freelance Drupal development (funny that).

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.

Contracting in Warrington

I have spent the last few months working in Warrington, and it looks like my contract is going to be extended for quite a bit more. I have had a difficult decision, to carry on working so far from home with one hell of a drive each Monday and Friday, or to hunt for something much more local. The advantage of working where I am is that it is a big customer, guaranteed to pay their bills on time. The only disadvantage is location. That said, quite a number of my colleagues are long distance commuters. One does the journey from London daily. Now the darker, colder (I almost said wetter, but the summer wasn’t great either) weather is here, then getting up on that Monday morning for a four-five hour drive is less and less attractive.

Back to Gym and swimming

Good eating at the B&B has led to a gradual increase in my belt length, and I am starting to see the yo-yo weight loss/gain cycle swing back. So, refusing to give in, I have joined a local gym (in Warrington) and for the last few weeks have managed to get there 4 times per week. A couple of gym sessions and a couple of long swims each week should stave off the creeping waistline. In fact, I have already noticed a small decline.

Cycling at the weekends is on the backburner too, I’m afraid, as Alison has been unable to ride due to her running injury. So, the new cycle roof rack has hardly been used. Oh well, not long till spring.

Drupal odds and sods

I am still enjoying the Drupal CMS, and keep toying with moving this blog back. I have been experimenting with a site with more static pages and less timeline orientated, but still retaining some blog-like features and think that Drupal will give the best of both. I have also managed to do some freelancing on Drupal, so not diluting my skills with yet another system seems a good idea.

iPod Classic

I am saddened to keep hearing rumours that Apple may be dropping the iPod classic as the flash based storage devices have a lot of advantages. I see this, but the 160Gb Classic has enabled me to ditch an external brick I was using for camcorder footage and backups while away from home, so please, please don’t ditch it Apple, until you have at least a couple of hundred gigs of flash on a device.

I have finished migrating back to Wordpress now.

Why? Because I am not actively doing any Drupal work at present, so it seemed a big overhead maintaining Drupal blogs along with my families Wordpress blogs. The anti-spam technology was different for both, and both needed upgrading regularly, plus there are always advisories to patch. Now I only have to worry about one set of technology. Also, I wasn’t doing anything particularly special in my blogs that Wordpress couldn’t do anyway.

But, why not move the other blogs to Drupal? Because, all said and done, Drupal is much less end-user friendly and the people writing in those blogs have more to worry about than playing with fancy CMS tools.

I am in the process of migrating my blog to Drupal, which is my preferred system. Wordpress is still recommended for other members of my family.

So, the theme is the basic one at the moment, but over Christmas I will be customising it greatly.

The official release of Gallery 2 has been unvieled, along with a spanking new website (based on Drupal). I happily upgraded these sites last night, and only had a minor wobble with the WPG2 plugin.

Along side this release, ozgreg has released WPG2 1.0 for Wordpress, making a very nice combo.

All Drupal and Wordpress related posts will now be in a seperate blog. This is because the two subjects of home life and software musings don’t really belong together and have a seperate readership.

The old software related posts will remain here for archive purposes, all new entries will appear in the new home.