WorldBeatPlanet & ShareYourMusic updated

I now have Drupal 4.6 running at WorldBeatPlanet & ShareYourMusic.com. The only difficult part was updating to the new event module. There are a few tricks to it.

• The new event module is based on Flexinode, which I wasn’t using previously. It creates a new flexinode type for events and the upgrade script converts most of the data to the new flexinode type.
• The node type needs to be changed from ‘event’ to ‘flexinode-1’ (or whatever the new flexinode type is). It can be done with a simple SQL query:

  update node set type='flexinode-1' where type='event'

• Flexinode doesn’t show the body text, so I had to add a new text area and copy the data to that field. That can be done with a SQL query:

  insert into flexinode_data (nid,field_id,textual_data) select nid,2,body from node where type="flexinode-1";

• Now here’s the tricky part: You have to specifically tell it that the event type should be shown in the event calendar. That’s done in admin content under the configure tab.

I was previously using an ugly theme hack to allow WorldBeatPlanet and ShareYourMusic to share the same content but with a different appearance, but Drupal 4.6 provides a much nicer way to do it. Instead of conf.php it now uses a separate settings.php file for each site. You can now specify a database prefix only for certain tables. I now have both sites using the same database so the content & user list is shared, but each uses different blocks, boxes, menu, variable, and cache tables, so I can change the block layout & menu structure for each site.