I can never keep a secret.
I'm serious about getting the Niggerati Network started now. I've upgraded it to the latest Drupal and it went well enough that I may risk it on this fraggin' humongous database. It's full of the sort of changes that will appeal to coders, but just as important the admin interface is a lot more rational (though I just looked at Mambo's interface and felt real jealous).
Better, I have a grip on the codebase such that I'm pretty sure I can do whatever I want. For instance:
- Having just gotten a grip on the theming system I built one from scratch, and of course I did stuff that I wasn't really supposed to. As a result (pointing at a couple of blogs that survived the previous efforts) if you look at the banners here, here and here you see that blogs or diaries or whatever you want to call them get to specify the header image, name (in green), slogan (in white) and mission (in red). The blog name link in the header goes to the blog page of the author; the one around the link goes to the site's index page.
- I have a calendar on which I'll be posting public events that I become aware of. Pretty much like what I've been posting all along, but now their on a calendar. That means I'm less likely to forget stuff. I built it using the Flexinode module because it's was quick but I'll likely rework it with custom code because Flexinode stuff doesn't strike me as very searchable.
- Once I work out some CSS issues there will be WYSIWYG editing that actually works without extra pages to the browser history.
- This thing is now a piece of cake to run multiple sites from. I had set up a support site for some of my Drupal code with a really random URL. I think I'll be moving it to run under the N-Net. I'll probably show some of the simple but highly sought after stuff I haven't really shared yet, like multi-page nodes.
- I can read Atom files in the aggregator now. That's a hack and I don't know what's taking them so long to work that into core...I suspect a touch of disdain for all things bloggish. But anyway, I can load up a whole bag of feeds now and I know there code out there to let members with blog stuff directly from the aggregator. If I find it, I'll be loading up mostly the sort of sites bloggers like to overanalyze.
- They did add an RSS 2.0 API. This is a BIG improvement on the outgoing syndication side.
Really cool stuff is planned but not scheduled, like there are some media-aware Flexinode capabilities I'll likely duplicate so they can be searched and sorted. Plus I'm not thrilled with actually hosting a bunch of huge media files so if it's possible I intend to make uploading will be optional, and it may be limited by user role. We shall see.
