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Updated the user pages on anthrocon.org
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.
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?
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?
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What database port? I just wrote some PHP code.
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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 .)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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