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

[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.