Autarchy of the Private Cave

Just a quick note: upgrading Drupal using a patch file is a really efficient and fast method, especially because diff/patch files are available for different Drupal version combinations.

This will be the 2nd DrupalCamp in Kyiv. Please click the logo to visit the official web-site to learn more.

Today I had a task of displaying random node in a Views-generated sidebar block.

This is how to do that:

1. edit the view which makes the block available (follow http://your.site/admin/build/views/viewname/edit)
2. in the Sort Criteria section, add the Random criteria.

It can’t be simpler than that.

Simplest way to develop your custom Drupal theme is to start with some skeleton/wireframe theme.

In this post, I’m briefly reviewing 4 themes (atck, blueprint, framework, and zen), made specifically to serve as theme developer’s starting point. All 4 are listed with their features (as per Drupal project page of each one), with my personal “impressions” (not based on actual use experience, yet). There’s also my choice and order of preference for the 4 candidates at the end.
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Some things to be aware of when enhancing Drupal site with FLV video playing/conversion features.

• Setup wizard for the free JW FLV Media Player (and the JW FLV Media Player itself)
• Flash Video in Drupal 5: A complete multimedia tutorial to the flashvideo module
• actual flashvideo module page on drupal.org

This post provides several links which would be useful for the beginning Drupal developers, or developers deciding which CMS to use as the base for their next project. Also, strengths of Drupal are highlighted.

Intensively working with Drupal during the past two weeks, I find it to be an excellent tool, and also much more than a YACMS.

Now I think that Drupal is also a framework – providing invisible to developer caching, session handling, access control, theming, localization, and more. The minimal effort required to extend already huge Drupal functionality is to write your own module – and, if done right, your module will immediately benefit from all the bonuses Drupal provides.

But Drupal also really shines as a CMS! You can start with a free design theme, and without any PHP knowledge have your custom portal built within a week – with your own hands, if you desire! (Note: “within a week” is true, but only if you already know what exactly you should be doing; learning time is short, but it’s not within that same week.)

What makes Drupal so powerful? I’d say that beautiful core and numerous modules.

What Drupal has to offer?
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Is that only me, or WordPress is really leaning towards the Drupal ideology?

Here’s what I mean:

• user levels were changed to user roles – just like in Drupal
• now, instead of categories and just recently introduced tags, the word ‘taxonomy’ is used – which is a Drupal slang
• ‘widgets’ work just like ‘blocks’ in Drupal – even style IDs are assigned the same way, e.g. id=”widget subscribe_to_comments_widget”
• (add here the similarity you found yourself)

I wonder, what will be next. PHPTemplate support, as default theming engine?
Or no-backwards-compatibility policy?
Or, best for WP users, advanced Drupal-like caching and throttling techniques?

drupaldojo.com – at the moment of writing, has 42 video-lessons (screencasts) of developing with Drupal.

Drupal technical introduction
It’s quite old, but as it describes core functionality, it should be still actual.

Please comment if you know of any other good high-quality technical Drupal introductions/descriptions.

Post last updated: January 3, 2010.

The newest script version migrates from PHP-Nuke 6.5 to Drupal 5.x.
Download the latest version of the migration script.

In 2002 I set up a PHPNuke-6.0 – based portal. Eventually it died due to the lack of time investments and support from collaborators. Now, when time came to revive the project, I made a search and decided to use Drupal as a base CMS for the portal.
In order to migrate userbase from an old portal to the new Drupal-powered one, and following the topic at drupal.org, I found a script and its modification.
I used it to migrate only users, and made some cosmetic changes:

• added options for custom phpnuke table prefixes
• default user name is now = uname (login), not ‘temp_name’, as before
• I replaced hard-coded links to ‘migrate.php’ with links to $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], so that if you rename the script you don’t have any problems with that
• now forum topics should not be promoted to the main page (changed 1 to 0 as hinted by Alexis)

Finally, I would like to thank both Karthik Kumar for the original script and Alexis Bellido for the 6.0_to_4.7 modification.
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