Updated the user pages on anthrocon.org

[giza]

Wow, it's been awhile since I've written here. Real life has had me very busy lately. I've done some neat things though, and I hope to post more about them soon.

The first neat thing I did recently was to roll out some badly needed updates for the user pages on anthrocon.org.

Before, I merely used the default pages that Drupal provided. The problem was that the pages looked a little... bland. Among other things, there were no icons for the various social networking services, and that just wouldn't do. So I read up on how to customize the user profile layout in Drupal and spent a couple of evenings writing some PHP code and making use of Drupal's theming functions.

Here are the old and the new pages side by side. Click on either to get a full page in a separate window.

Old and busted:		New hotness:

The upside of this effort is that when I'm ready to upgrade the Save Ardmore Coalition site to Drupal 6, I can pretty much just copy over my user templates on a wholesale basis, and save myself from having to redo all that work. :-)

How has everyone else been here in LJ-land?

Comments

[kyraeus.livejournal.com]

Very smooth. The gaming additions and such are a really nice touch, since the massive populace of AC are gamer nerds. Did the database port over fairly easily? Or did you have a massive boost of people having to go in and update or bug you about data in their profiles tweaking out/etc?

[giza.livejournal.com]

What database port? I just wrote some PHP code.

[kyraeus.livejournal.com]

Bad wording. More so I was just wondering if the new format of everything played hob with the actual data saved in the profiles at all, since it looks like some of the actual fields didn't exist before, or if it just asked all the previous users to update and add in, leaving the new fields blank until they do.

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

Very nice!

Why even bother with Drupal 6? You could wait until Drupal 7, which I'm guessing will be out in mid to late summer. Avoiding a repeat of the D6 module debacle, a lot of module maintainers have promised that their modules will be out on the day of D7's release: See http://cyrve.com/d7cx . (A list of modules tagged with "D7CX" is at http://drupal.org/project/modules?solrsort=sort_title%20asc&text=d7cx&display=table .)

[giza.livejournal.com]

Because many of the modules I wanted to use were only being developed for D6.

Also, I've been running D6 for many months now.

[greenreaper.livejournal.com]

I'd love to run D7 but there are questions over D7's performance, and as Giza says, a lot of modules aren't on board with it. Many aren't actively maintained, and you can't squeeze a guarantee out of an unmaintained module.

Worse, in Drupal the modules appear to be tightly coupled to a changing API. This is quite unlike MediaWiki; it took me just one evening to migrate to the latest beta in our test architecture (and most of that was fixing WikiFur-specific patches). There was only one extension with an issue, and it's one I could work around easily if I had to - fortunate, since it's heavily used by some of our editions. I foresee it taking considerably longer to update to D7.

There's absolutely a lot of cool features there (//drupalcode.org/viewvc/drupal/drupal/CHANGELOG.txt?view=markup), but users care a lot more about content than what the web server is running. I'm sure these issues can be resolved, and will be . . . but I'd rather wait until they are.

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

You're wise to do so. I started revising my Drupal book based on the belief that a UI freeze meant that, you know, the UI wouldn't change anymore. How wrong I was! I lost dozens of hours to that.

Now I'm waiting for the Release Candidate... and even at that, I'm nervous. So it goes with software development, particularly when everyone's a volunteer....

Having said that: They're really managing this release well. The D7CX project was a great idea, and I think we'll see much faster adoption than with D6 as a result. It's worth a second look once it's released.

[greenreaper.livejournal.com]

It's good to see AC's website has become a little more readable. That background looks nice but honestly made it harder to use.

I'm busy, and rather saddened by this news (//www.flayrah.com/c/furry-author-michael-bard-gravely-ill), but good otherwise.

I recently made a patch to fivestar[extra] (//drupal.org/node/189527#comment-2686214) to discourage people from voting on their own work and comments. The perception that others are able to probably matters more than the actual ability to do so. On checking, I found self-voting was relatively rare - though those who did it tended to do so frequently, and always 4 or 5.

Oh, and last night I had fun explaining to someone why it was a really bad idea (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery) to permit modifications to their custom content-based site through un-tokened GET requests. Good times.

[wildw0lf.livejournal.com]

The new page looks great, good work.