Technology

Drupal is a Open Source Content Management System that I started working with a couple of years ago. I originally started looking at it because I wanted to update my Church website off of a static Dreamweaver based website to something that would be easier for multiple people to update. I have since used it to develop this simple blog website as well as a couple of smaller websites for local groups. My sites are still pretty simple and I am constantly learning better ways to accomplish things using Drupal and it keeps getting better with new revisions.

The learning curve for Drupal is quite steep because it is very powerful but once you get started there are so many things that you can do with it. Drupal.org has a large community that does a pretty good job of answering questions for those that have taken the time to do some basic research.

One of the drawbacks with Drupal is it has not had as much exposure in the past as other CMS's like Wordpress. Drupal is working on that but needs more support. Recently Drupal was setting up a booth at OSCON to get more exposure. They asked for donations from the Drupal Community to help cover the costs of the booth. They had a target of $2500 and came up a bit short so they may not have been as successful as they would have liked. I find it a bit amazing that with all the people that are using and developing Drupal that they could not raise such a small amount. If the Drupal community wants to see Drupal succeed we need to do a better job of supporting efforts like this to get Drupal more exposure.

Drupal is a great CMS but it needs more than just the developers to help it grow. For those of us that are not developers or programmers that use Drupal we need to do our part to help it grow in other ways. That means that more of us have to be willing to donate when we can to help get the word out.

I had mentioned a couple days ago that I was very surprised to find that the Geeks and God Podcast is back on the air. The format is a little different than the past but it is still a great podcast worth listening to. The original hosts are no longer doing the podcast but they have very capable replacements. The hosts are now a group of about 5 or 6 guys that have been long time moderators on the Geeks and God Forums. They bring differing expertise to the table and so far the two episodes that I have listened to have been pretty good. They are now doing the podcast monthly instead of weekly but the format seems to be working well. it's not the weekly fix that I had been used to in the past but I am looking forward to the next podcast in May.

The Alpha for Drupal 7 has been out for a week now so I had to download and install it to see what this new version is going to be like.  I installed it on my Mac running MAMP as that is the sytem I used for development and testing.  The install went easily enough.  Enter the Database name, username, and password and you are on your way.  There were a couple more choices for options during the initial install but those are pretty self explanatory.

 The first thing I noticed when I logged in was the Dashboard and admin menu.  I am really liking that this is now part of Drupal Core since I always installed the admin menu module as one of the first things I did whenever I install Drupal.  I love the new menu overlays.  They make things much easier to find.

 The other thing I noticed right away is that it seems faster.  Granted I am running with a very Basic system with no extra modules enabled yet but it seems faster out of the box to me.  I am going to take more time this weekend to setup a copy of my Website running on the new version to see how well it works and go through all of the options to see what else i can find.

 Based on what I have seen so far, I can't wait for Drupal 7 to get to a Release version so I can convert my existing sites to it.

A month ago I switched my personal blog from Drupal to Wordpress.  Not I have switched it back again.  I found that I really did want to spend the time to learn how to put together my own theme and not just settle for something that someone else put together.  This is still a work in progress but it is better than I had before on Wordpress and I have learned quite a bit about CSS and theming in the last month.  Since I am now up to four different Drupal sites that I am working on, I need to learn as much as I can about how it works and what I can do with it.  No more Wordpress for me.

I spent a little time this weekend trying to figure out how to connect my Blog and Facebook.  I have had my Blog longer but I spend more time on Facebook as that is where many friends and games are. I didn't want to give up my Blog site though since there are still some people that I want to be able to see some things that I post that don't have or want Facebook accounts.

I started out by thinking that maybe I could setup an RSS feed here to import my Facebook status and that would keep this site more up to date.  That ended up not being an option since Facebook has made if very difficult to export your status outside of Facebook.

I did some research and found that Twitter would allow me to do some of what I wanted.  I could post short updates on Twitter and those updates would be propagated to Facebook automatically.  I installed the Twitter module for Drupal here and now those Twitter updates get posted to a block on my website as well.  This also works well since I have this setup so that when I post a blog entry here, a link to that blog gets sent to both Twitter and Facebook.  So far this looks like it will workout well.

One of the driving forces for me to get this in place now is that the San Diego 3 Day is only 39 Days away.  I like being able to post pictures and short updates during the 3 Day so that those that donated to my walk can see how I am doing throughout the weekend.

I think this is going to work out just fine.  Between Twitter for Status Messages and Flickr for Pictures, I am all set.