Drupal

Since my last post about Blog to it, 1 week and 20 hours ago, I have been working solidly on the idea. So far the development site features the creation of your own blog using wmostrey's DrupalMU install profile, Twitter integration using walkah's Twitter module and rating of blog posts using Eaton's Fivestar module.

I have been maintaining this blog since March and been using the Drupal content management system to run it. A Skribit question asked was "Why do you use Drupal?", well the reason is, when I started my current job at International Baccalaureate I was required to help with the development of their Community Theme web site, which was Drupal based.

This sparked my interest in Drupal and showed me just how powerful it was. I had not heard of Drupal until I applied for this job and the only content management system I had used before was PHP-Nuke.

After finishing the Community Theme website I built this site and carried on developing using Drupal at home and in work.

Last week I came up with what I think is a great idea, I have Twittered a little bit about it and this has started questions on Skribit about what "Blog to it" is?

Well, Blog to it will merge many Web 2.0 ideas and technologies together into a site where you can find new blogs, promote your blog and even start blogging. The idea is, when a user registers for Blog to it they will be able to add blog RSS feed URLs to the site. These blog posts will then be imported into Blog to it where users can read and rate the blogs and their posts. When adding the feed the user would of selected a category where the blog and all it's posts will be stored making interesting blogs and posts easy to find.

Wordpress first appeared in 2003 as a single user blogging system, there is now both a hosted version and a downloadable open source version. Some time after the first release of Wordpress, Wordpress MU (or Multi-user) was released. This enables the creation of multiple Wordpress blogs from one Wordpress MU install.

This week I decided that now ImageField was available for Drupal 6 I would move from Image Attach to ImageField. This all went fine and works well, but ImageCache does not work very well with Lighttpd web server.

ImageCache is module that crops and resizes ImageField images, these are then saved within in the files directory. The module makes use of Drupal's CleanURLs system and Apache's Mod_rewrite function. Apache is a widely used web server but because of my lack of RAM I have chosen to use Lighttpd. Lighttpd doesn't work in the same way as Apache so ImageCache ends up getting confused.

The other problem I am having is when an image file is uploaded via ImageField the permissions are not set high enough to allow it to be displayed.

Over the last 6 months I have been working for a company on a selection of in-house developments. Yesterday in a meeting I found myself saying "Is Drupal too general?" and that got me thinking, "is it?".

After playing around with Raincity's Basic theme and creating the crude looking theme for this site I thought it was time to make a custom theme for my "web development company" site.

So this time I used the layout-fixes.css file to create a fixed size page. The main page div is set to 800x600 so the content looks good on most screen sizes and the proportions also look good in the ratio 4:3. The content-inner div is set with an overflow of auto so that the 800x600 size is always maintained and scrollbars are added to the content if needed. The site background was generated using one of the many stripped background generators, but all the other graphics where hand made in photoshop.

Today I have been playing around with Drupal themeing. I used Raincity's Basic theme (http://drupal.org/project/basic) as a starting block, it is based upon Zen theme, and seems a little easier to customise. With only one hours work I was able to come up with what you see now.

I hope to customise it a bit more ove the next week, but as a developer and not a designer it takes me a little longer to work out what looks good and what doesn't.

One thing I can't seem to get working is the primary links. I'm not sure why but they arn't displaying. That's another thing to look into this week.

I was bored for a couple of hours this weekend and started to wonder if a microblogging site in Drupal.

There are now quite a few microblogging sites online such as Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and Plurk. I am a heavy user of Twitter as you can see from the right hand column of this site, but with all the network problems and downtime it is having can I make the follow up.

Can I do to Twitter what Facebook did to Myspace?

So I started work on http://www.foocity.com, and after 2 hours work, things look hopeful!

If you frequently read my blog you may remember I was writing an article for Naked Wales about Drupal.

Well the web based magazine has now been released and my article can be found within.

I have attached the magazine for your reading pleasure, hope you all enjoy!