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June 23, 2004

If I knew then what I know now

Major experimentation with converting this blog to Drupal. I found a TREMENDOUS Perl script that, after I shook out a bug in the trackback conversion, sucked down every post from P6/Green without a burp. I did it with the current site.

Okay, I have to start with an absolutely clean database for it to be truly burp-less. And because of the way I posted and converted other sites (see the title) it will not be straightforward rewriting the old URIs to new, Drupalled ones. I'm still working on that , and a couple of other issues I'm probably making a bigger production than necessary about.

But you can see pretty much what the new site will be capable of now. You can set up a user account and access stuff immediately. If you do, don't get attached. It all gets blown away.

Posted by P6 at June 23, 2004 05:17 PM
Trackback URL: http://www.niggerati.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2410
Comments

What's the benefit of Drupal? I am looking at non-hosted (Scoop) and hosted (Blogware) programs, and trying to figure out what gives the most flexibility.

Posted by Mithras at June 24, 2004 11:43 AM

As usual, it depends on what you want to do. Drupal has been called "too configurable," and there was a time I agreed, but that was at least one major release ago. Now I find it equally configurable but it comes with good defaults.

The specific things I need are
- multiple blogs
- member groups to control access rights
- multi-page posts (for my link collections)
- imports that work smoothly
- category heirarchy (as many as you like)
- the ability to "pin" posts
- easy RSS aggregation (Drupal has a plugin that will import RSS entries as full posts, searchable, commentable if you like)
- community moderation of posts and comments
- optional content by member in tthe sidebar

Drupal ships with the ability to post stories, pages (which bypass any work flow you may have set up), blog entries and book pages. Any of them can be moderated by the community or added to any "book" you like (the major appeal to me; this makes it easy to tie a series of posts together in chronological order, which makes it easier to follow). The printing capability is tremendous: books are

What Drupal does NOT have is MT's range of plugins and folks that know how to work them. You'll notice Scoop-like sites tend not to have a list of weekly/monthly archive links in the sidebar like MT does…not the easiest thing to implement when every page is created dynamically. And Drupal dosn't have a template system. It has a THEME system shipped in three basic flavors, one of which uses templates. And it's "convert line feed" filter isn't the best (Wordpress has the best filter, BTW).

From a user's perspective, Drupal's easy enough to administer. Most of the plugins install by copying a module into a directory. The major plugins that add content types need more hand-holding.

And there's actual manuals, online at Drupal.org, built with the Book functionality. One for users, one for adminitrators and one for developers. In fact, I'm a bit quieter than usual because I'm working on a plugin.

Posted by P6 at June 24, 2004 01:59 PM