Building Drupal Forums at AASHE

Monday
Nov 09,2009

The idea of building a Campus Sustainability Forum has been kicking around my organization for years. When the organization was choosing a CMS about three years ago, one of the major reasons we went with Drupal was the forum integration.

I ran into the same problem as bangpound when I wanted to downgrade from PHP 5.3 on MacPorts to Drupal 6. Although Drupal 6.14 supports PHP 5, when I set up a new install, install.php became a sea of "function ereg() is deprecated."

I don't have Macports in SVN and instead just do "sudo port install ." I was able to switch back to PHP 5.2.11 with the following:

1. sudo port deactivate php5
2. sudo port install php52 +mysql5 (this probably wasn't available when he wrote the initial blog post)

As co-organizer of the Triangle Drupal group, I've met some great people who have had some terrible experiences with Drupal. At the same time, I have become increasingly frustrated by my inability to accurately predict what Drupal projects will succeed and which will fail.

Preparation

A. Upgrade modules and Drupal core code

Although it’s tempting to move your files and database quickly, I strongly recommend doing some preparation first. Before I move Drupal site, I always first check for any new Drupal core and module updates. If there are modules that need to be updated, I do the update before moving my site. The advantage of this is that it is easier later on to debug any problems that arise during the migration if you are already using the latest version of all Drupal code.

Drupal: A Love Story

Thursday
Apr 23,2009

I presented on Drupal at UNC's An Introduction to Content Management Systems workshop last week. The presentation is geared to people trying to decide between Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress. I hope that I swayed a few to the Drupal camp!

I came back from Drupalcon excited about adding RDF into the AASHE website and making some decisions about how to tag content on the website.

I often have a hard time deciding whether to use a CCK field or the taxonomy module when building Drupal sites. At Drupalcon, I was glad to see that I am not alone in my confusion. At the Drupalcon Drupal Taxonomy Revisted session, I finally started to understand the use case for each.

These are the steps I took to add the recent tweets block you see on the right of my blog page.

1. Created a new block with the Title and Block Description, "Recent Tweets."

2. Pasted the following code into the Block Body. I originally found the code here.

  1. <div id="twitter_div">
  2. <ul id="twitter_update_list"></ul></div>
  3. <script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js"></script>

Syndicate content