drupal

Wow, time flies when you're having fun. I hadn't intended to spend the day playing with Drupal, but the incontrovertible fact is that it's almost ten already, so I have. The idea was to enable the Pirate module (Arrrr!!!) and then take care of a couple of security advisories that affected my installation, requiring that I update Drupal core and the Date module. This ultimately ended up leading to my creating a sub-theme for the Marinelli theme.

Cutting to the chase: It was easy, if tedious.

Onward.

Where have I been for the past few months? I wrote 50,000 words of a novel in November while maintaining a full work schedule. Most of the novel was written after midnight; just thinking about the process of writing it makes me feel tired. Work's kept me pretty busy with lots of Drupal work. I've been flexing my artistic muscles a bit, doing some logo work for myself and for friends. I've done some troubleshooting on websites; last week I helped fix the theme over at the Panthers BBS my friend Eric runs. And three weeks ago, I upgraded Hackwater.com to Drupal 6.

Hey, you know what's fun? WYSIWYG that isn't.

Neil was trying to increase the speed of Drupal on one of the New England Region SCCA sites, and he told me about the early success he's had using eAccelerator for caching. So I decided to try it out.

I'm looking forward to the first week in March, because I'm going to Drupalcon with my co-workers. I've been using Drupal for almost a year now, so I'm still a relative newbie, but I feel I've learned a lot, and I've gotten to really enjoy hacking on modules and theming using templates. I'm very excited over what I might learn in a couple of weeks.

Oh, Intarwebs! I didn't mean to abandon you! I owe you Puerto Rico pictures! And Thanksgiving pictures! See, I've just been playing with your cousin over at rpg.hackwater.com, doing some theme hacking. In fact, this week has been my best programming week so far, solving problems and applying fixes left and right. After finishing a medium project at work that had me doing some cool Drupal hacking, I turned to various small issues in my queue that had been getting no play thanks to my focus on the larger project.

So after a month of playing around in the Drupal back end, theming and adding modules, I'm back to creating content. I've decided to get rid of the hierarchy that still need to get a nice camera to aid in the food adventures feature, and who knows? It may lead to some other
picture posts. I've been looking at the Lightbox module, for example... Imagine a Lightbox block with a randomly generated thumbnail. It could be pretty slick.

I've been heavily using Drupal for a couple months now, and I've finally absorbed enough to start troubleshooting the various migration issues that occurred when I went from Wordpress to what I'm playfully referring to as The Bazooka (because there's just so much you can do, and so many modules if you can't do something; it's amazing, and as I originally assessed years ago when I wanted a blogging platform, almost too powerful. Almost).

I finally took some time to update to WP 2.2.2. Naturally, this update broke Democracy again, so I have to go through my mini-hack that lets it work with WP-Cache and figure out what changed from the original 2.0 to 2.2.2. I also have to go through my plugins to figure out what else I broke. I'm starting to feel nostalgic for Drupal's file structure. More on that later.