Drupal

IntelliTXT Decision

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I’ve decided on a compromise for IntelliTXT at MacMegasite. I’m keeping it, but using the Userpoints module to disable it for users with more than 50 points, which means users who have submitted 5 or more articles.

The trouble with freeform tagging

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I decided to get rid of freeform tagging at MacMegasite because it was becoming too unmanageable. Since members can create their own tags by simply entering names, there were many duplicate tags with misspellings and lots of unique tags that were only assigned to a single post.

Drupal lists all taxonomy terms from different vocabularies together, so you can’t easily distinguish user-defined tags from primary topics. If a tag has the same name as a topic, a post with that tag won’t appear in the listing for that topic, which can make it more difficult to find content and can be confusing to users.

To make up for eliminating tags, I added several new topics, including iPhone and AppleTV. I’ll continue to refine the topics in the next few days to make it easier to find articles.

WorldBeatPlanet upgraded to Drupal 5.1

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I finally upgraded WorldBeatPlanet. Unlike MacMegasite, this upgrade was painful, since I was running Drupal 4.6 with lots of modules and several custom content types. I had to first upgrade the database to Drupal 4.7 and then to 5.1. A few features still don’t work, but the site looks a lot nicer now.

Now with AJAX goodness

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I’ve added a few new features to MacMegasite to bring more AJAX yumminess and make it more social. Blocks and menus are now collapsable and buddy lists are supported. It can also notify Twitter when content is posted.

MacMegasite Upgraded to 5.1

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I upgraded MacMegasite to Drupal 5.1. The upgrade was fairly painless except for the RSS feed redirections to Feedburner, which I had to fix in my .htaccess and make a few small changes to the node module.

Drupal 5.0 Released

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Drupal 5.0 has finally been released. I plan to upgrade all of my sites. MacMegasite should be pretty straightforward, since it’s already running 4.7. WorldBeatPlanet will be more difficult since it’s still running 4.6 and uses several extra modules, including e-commerce.

Drupal 5.0

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Drupal 5.0 is already in beta. I still haven’t upgraded WorldBeatPlanet to Drupal 4.7 as I did with my other sites, since it uses a few custom modules as well as eCommerce, so it’s a lot more difficult. I’ll probably upgrade it directly to 5.0. Right now I’m pretty busy with work & XPressLinux so I don’t know when I’ll have a chance to work on it.

Joshua Brauer: Never store tar backups in web accessible directory

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Via Planet Drupal:

One blog is accumulating Google code searches that reveal information they shouldn’t. For example this search produces a list of some Drupal database usernames and passwords. Most are for distributions but a few folks have unwisely put backups of their configuration files in .tar files inside their web accessible directories.

Simply put, no file containing sensitive data should ever be stored in a web accessible directory unless it has the proper extension to prevent random browsing. Files like Drupal’s settings.php are OK because they must go through the PHP processor. Putting settings.php.txt or a .tar file with a settings.php in a web directory is a bad idea.

MacMegasite changes complete

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I’ve installed the new theme at MacMegasite and I’ve also created a mobile edition, available at http://mobile.macmegasite.com/ which uses a minimalist theme with no graphics. I did it through the magic of Drupal’s multiple site feature. I copied settings.php from the default site to a new site directory and simply added an override for default_theme.

Now that I’ve finished these changes to MacMegasite I can turn my attention to WorldBeatPlanet, which I’ve been neglecting. WorldBeatPlanet is still running Drupal 4.6, because it’s a lot more complex than MacMegasite. I use a few custom modules and the e-commerce module, so I’ve avoided trying to upgrade it to 4.7. I’d also like to change the store section to allow artists to have their own store where they’ll get paid directly for file downloads.