Goodbye to Drupal

I started learning Drupal about 8 years ago when I decided to update our Parish website from a Dreamweaver Solution to something that I or others could update without having to have a proprietary program on their computer.  Drupal has a rather steep learning curve but it is rather powerful and has a pretty great community of supporters that help develop it and make it better.  I am saying goodbye to Drupal as I will no longer have time to develop the Parish Website and the people that they are looking to develop a new site for us plan to use Wordpress for the new site.  I can't say that I blame them.  Wordpress has a huge market share and there are many more developers that work with Wordpress and in turn the sites are usually less expensive to develop.  I had switched my blog from Drupal to Wordpress sometime back because I had less time and was looking for something simple to allow me to blog when I felt like it and add a couple of other pages.  Wordpress makes this very easy for us amateurs.  I enjoyed the platform and the community but now it's time for me to move on.

Goodbye to Drupal

I converted my blog from Drupal back to Wordpress several months ago and have not gone back so far.  Wordpress is much easier to deal with from a user perspective.  Media Handling is so much easier than Drupal for something like my basic blog.  I am now working on converting my Church Website and my one other site from Drupal to Wordpress also.  I have found there are several plugins for Wordpress that give me the ability to setup my website similar to how I could with Drupal in the past.  There are different ways to do things in Wordpress but I am going to stay this time.  Drupal keeps getting more complex and is getting beyond the reach of the casual user or hobbyist.

Back to Wordpress Again

My blog has moved back and forth several times between Wordpress and Drupal. Now I am back on Wordpress. I had tried to convert from Wordpress last year because I was kind of upset with Drupal for removing blogapi from core when they went to Drupal 7 and the contrib module did not progress for a long time. I liked the authoring abilities of Wordpress but there were some things like views that I used a little on my blog that I could not easily replicate in Wordpress. After some more research and a new desire to actually use my blog some more I found that there are some free plugins that let me accomplish what I want.

I think this time I am going to stay on Wordpress and look to use it on other smaller sites as well. It is more suited towards a small personal blog like mine. Drupal keeps getting more powerful and I am really not their target market.

New Omega Theme For My Site

I spent much of my Holiday Weekend working on reworking the theme for my blog.  There were a couple of reason that I wanted to do this.  One was I was not happy with the way the site looked. The other was I spent some time watching drupalize.me videos on Omega so I had a little bit better idea of how to set things up in Omega.  I have to admit I like the look better now but I was really a pain at times.  Finding node.tpl.php was not straight forward and it took me some time to figure out how to declare the template variable in the node pre-process function instead of putting the code in template.php.  There are some other things I want to do to my blog but this will have to do for now since I have two other sites I need to spend some time on.  At least now I have a better idea of how to make things work in Omega.

Back to Drupal Again

I had converted my blog back to Wordpress a couple of months ago and I liked how it looked and was easy to access using mobile tools.  The problem with it was that I could not do some things that I wanted to do with Wordpress that were trivial when using Drupal.  You take things like CCK and Views for granted when you don't have them.  For instance, I keep a list on my site of the names of people that I walk in support or in memory of when I walk in the Komen 3-Day.  I could not find an easy way to keep that list in Wordpress but it was very simple in Drupal.  Define a custom content type to store the names of the person and how I now them.  Then setup a view to only show the names.  5 mimute effort with Drupal but really not easily done unless you use a commercial Wordpress module.  So back to Drupal it is.  I have pretty much finished up making the changes that I wanted to my blog and I have something that will work for now.

Back to Wordpress

This weekend I converted my blog back from Drupal to Wordpress.  I like Drupal and will continue to use it where it makes sense to.  I just decided that for my personal blog it no longer made sense.  It was more complex than I really needed for my small blog. The other major issue with Drupal from my perspective was that they removed blogapi from core when they went to Drupal 7.  That made it impossible for me to use the external editors that I had been used to using with Drupal 6.  I like being able to update my blog from my phone or Mac and not have to always use a browser.  Maybe now that I am settled with this I can get back to using the blog more than I have been.

Back to Drupal 6

I had upgraded my blog from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 and most things were working there. I had planned to just deal with some diminished functionality for now but after a couple weeks decided I couldn't. The biggest issues for me was the lack of a functioning blogapi and the twitter module. I use them both on my site. I use blogapi so that I can compose blog posts from my Mac using an external editor. I also like to add things to my blog using iblogger on my iphone. I could not get either working with Drupal 7 yet. I also use the twitter module to post things from my blog to twitter and that feeds into facebook. As I am training for the 3-Day I use both of those tools quite a bit so I guess I won't look at upgrading to Drupal 7 again until after my walk in August. I really wish I could have kept the blog on Drupal 7 because I really like the new interface and usability features.

Website Updates

Well I finally spent some time getting my website updated. When I updated my blog from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 I lost some functionality and now most of it is back. I wanted to get things back to where I wanted them so that I was ready to post training blogs as I begin my training for the Twin Cities 3 Day in August. I like to post entries when train so that my donors know that I am working to get ready for the walk. In addition to adding a content type that lets me track my miles of walking, I can actually track my walk maps this year as well. I am adding a little each time I have time to work on the website.

Drupalcon Chicago Day 2

It was another exciting day at Drupalcon Chicago. Went to a bunch of sessions and birds of a feather meetings and learned a lot. Got to meet some more people today that I recognized from the Drupal Community and it's cool to be able to put a face with a name or twitter name. I have so many tools and modules that I want to check out. That will keep me busy for some time. Also I have heard a bunch of ways to approach development and testing that I need to look into. Looking back at sites that I started a year or more ago, I made some many decissions that were based on the old html way of doing things. One of my favorite sessions today was actually a talk on joke modules and their place in the Drupal Community. It was very interesting and I had never heard of most of them. Also got to spend some time with a bunch of Church web developers looking at some cool things that Bob Christenson of MustardSeedMedia has been working on.

I can't wait to get home and start working on a new site.

 

Drupalcon Chicago Day 1

Well the first day of Drupalcon Chicago is over and it has been a pretty good day. The keynote by Dries was interesting. Some recognition for the people that have put so much work into Drupal 7 and then onto how they plan to make Drupal 8 even better. Had some good sessions today. Got some good tips on a couple of tools to use for theming. Attended a Birds of a Feather on theming and actually was able to contribute to the discussion and help some people who knew less than me get a handle on where to start.

I attended a session on best practices for having separate Dev/Test/Production environments but it was way over my needs. As the only person working on the websites I manage, my environment is just Dev/Prod with Dev being my Mac and prod being my VPS at Future Hosting. I did again hear good things about Drush and I have to check that out.

The Drupal opening night party at the Field Museum was awesome. I don't know that I have ever seen that many web geeks in one place before. The party was very well organized and attended. After a little food and drink I took to wandering through the museum and actually met a number of people that I had interacted with only in forums and twitter before. It was very cool to meet Micah, Shrop, and Bob Christenson of Geeks and God fame. I have listened to those podcast for years now and learned much about drupal and Church websites from them. I even ran into a Drupal VIP and saw Webchick sitting at the next table at dinner. So far this has been an awesome conference and I am realy glad I came.

Time for some rest to get ready for Day 2.

 

Looking forward to Drupalcon

Next week I will be heading to Chicago for a couple days to attend Drupalcon. I am really looking forward to it. Drupal is an open source content management system that I use for my blog as well as my Church website. It's a very powerful system and even after a couple years of using it, I am still pretty much a novice. Drupalcon will allow me to pick up some more knowledge on what the best way to use this system is. It will also allow me to meet a bunch of other people working with the same software and see what kind of tips and issues they have. It should be really interesting. It's also nice that working with Drupal gives me something that is still technical but not work related to exercise my mind. I like learning but I don't like concentrating everything on one subject all the time.

My Drupal 7 Surprise

I upgraded my blog to Drupal 7 this weekend and for the most part I am pretty happy with the results so far. I had to disable my twitter functionality for now since that module is not Drupal 7 ready yet. I should have reviewed the release notes a little closer though since I did miss one important issue. Drupal 7 removed the blogapi functionality from core and the contrib module is not ready yet so I can use my Ecto client on my Mac or my iblogger client on my iPhone to update my blog. For now the only way I can post is to use the web interface. Hopefully that functionality will be back available in the next couple months.

 

Back to Drupal 6

I am strongly considering moving my site back to Drupal 6. I have been working for a couple days with my blog in Drupal 7 and have found that working in Drupal 7 is very slow. Working inside of Drupal 7 has actually been painful it is so slow at times. I am going to do a little more research but think I might go ahead and roll this back to Drupal 6 and regain all my functionality and some speed back.

 

Drupal Users Group

I have been working with Drupal for several years now and I am constantly learning more about this CMS. A couple months ago I decided to attend a meeting of my local Drupal Users group to see if I could learn more and maybe I could share something with others as well. The Drupal 414 group is fairly small but the meetings have been interesting and I think there is potential for the group to grow. I am finding the meetings helpful and am starting to get more involved. It's all a matter of time. There is at least one other web group in Milwaukee that I would like to join but they meet on Wednesday when I can't make it. Maybe I can in the future. In the mean time, if you are in Milwaukee and interested in Drupal, join us at a meeting on the Third Thursday of the Month.

 

Happy Birthday to My Blog

I was looking back at my Blog the other day and realized that I first posted to this Blog 3 years ago today. What started out as a Wordpress blog turned into a Drupal Blog and it keeps changing a little bit all the time. As I learn more about CSS or Photoshop I keep making changes trying to improve my site. I don't use it as often as I intended but I am working on that. I do tend to use it a lot when I am training for the 3 Day but I need to expand on that. I plan to keep using and developing the site for some time to come.

 

Drupal 7 Coming Soon

Drupal 7, the newest version of Drupal is coming soon. It is scheduled to release on January 5th. I have worked with the release candidates and beta releases a little bit and I am really looking forward to it's release and the associated module updates. There are some very cool enhancements in the new version I want to use. The new admin overlay and admin theme are very nice. It also seems a little snappier to me so far. If you are interested in more information you can follow the link on my page to the Drupal 7 start resources.

 

Finally Free Time to Work on Sites

I am so glad to be done with work for today so that I can have a long weekend to just spend with my family and not worry about work. I have some other things I would like to work on that I have been neglecting as well that I hope to get to this weekend. I have not spent any time working on my website or any other websites lately and I need to change that. Working on the couple websites that I do work on is something I enjoy. It can be frustrating at times because i really don't have the background for the artistic side of web design. I do enjoy spending time figuring out the CSS to make a site look like I want it to. I have to get better at being more creative in how I lay things out. Hopefully by the end of the year I will have updates made to my site as well as the Drupal414 site. That is the site that belongs to the Milwaukee Drupal Users Group and I have started attending those meetings and am starting to get involved in that group. It's fun to get together with some others that are working with the same platform and hear about some of the challenges that others are facing. Most of my issues are pretty minor. Can't wait for January for the release of Drupal 7. I really like some of the changes in the platform. I really can't wait until the modules I need are updated so I can convert my site to Drupal 7.

 

Promoting Drupal

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.

Drupal 7 First Impressions

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.

Good Drupal Training

I have been using Drupal to manage several websites for a couple years now but really have not spent as much time as I should have in learning more about CSS and Drupal theming. I have been relying on Drupal themes that others have put together and just making some very minor changes to the themes for the sites that I am maintaining. I spent some time over Christmas break working on a new theme for my Blog site and for my 3 Day Team site. To learn more about theming in Drupal I ordered some downloadable video tutorials from a group call the Lullabots that do training on how to do things in Drupal. I have not made it all the way through both videos yet but they are already helping me understand the theming much better than I had before and I consider them a good investment. The only problem I have now is having enough time to make all of the changes that I want to.