Eli the Computer Guy

Archive for the ‘Drupal’ Category

For the love of god I wish I was joking.  A while ago I added the Trackback module to this site.  I figured this would allow "nice" bloggers to show where and when they referenced my site.

I studiously kept track of my comments to make sure no one was posting garbage to my site, but then one day I went back to reference an old post and there were hundreds of spam links under the post.  I opened other old posts and found the same results.

My first thought was to check my comments, but they were all in order.  What I found out was that the Trackback module lists the sites that trackback to my post.  So what these XYZ spammers did was trackback to my post, and then their garbage link was posted to my blog post without me realizing it.

I’m sure there’s a "proper" way of dealing with this, but frankly I just disabled the module.

There’s a point that as a technologist I find spammers and the like curious and interesting, and there’s a point where they just really start to piss me off…

I have found a strange problem when pasting my blog entries into either Drupal or Wordpress.  If I right click and then select PASTE I lose all of the breaks in paragraphs.  The entire entry turns into one big blob of words.

For some reason if I use CTRL+V I keep all of my paragraphs.  I don’t know why this is…

While researching the best tools to use to create my sites I came across a number of blogs and commentaries trying to compare WordPress to Drupal.  Having used both to create sites I have no idea why anyone thinks that this is a discussion.

WordPress is a very user friendly piece of blogging software.  It is optimized for blogging and although you can force it to do other things it’s not really built for it.  WordPress is very easy to install.  It is very easy to install new plug ins (modules), and is generally pretty hard to screw up.  It is absolutely perfect for someone who wants to create and manage a personal or professional blog.

Drupal… well Drupal is another kettle of fish entirely.  Drupal is a full fledged CMS, Content Management System.  While there is a blogging component to Drupal it is only a very small portion of the overall software.  Drupal is very easy to install, but everything else about it can be an utter pain in the butt if you do not understand what you are doing.  You can create your entire website using Drupal and add in modules for everything from Forums, to Shopping Carts and Multimedia Libraries.  You can create user accounts and then allow them to have permissions to edit different portions of the site.  This is the type of software that newspapers use to run their online editions.

Whereas the average user can administer WordPress once it’s installed, for someone to administer Drupal they will need real world experience managing web sites and need to have a very good understanding of how Drupal works.  The Drupal site states it takes about 6 months to really learn how to use it.

So if you’re wondering whether to use Drupal or WordPress it’s really just a question of what you want to do, and how much time you have to muck around learning the software.

ArtISteer is the best software for developing WordPress and Drupal themes.  It’s incredibly easy to use and to deploy.  I use this for my personal, professional and client’s sites.  Using ArtISteer you can have an original Drupal site up and running within an hour.

Version 2.1 fixes some of the CSS issues with 2.0. In 2.0 menus had a habit of getting cut off by the theme’s border.  This has been fixed in 2.1.  They have added a couple of other features, but I find theCSS fixes are the most important.

The complete ArtISteer package only costs $129 with a year of updates.  If you need to get professional looking sites up and running quickly this is the way to go.  I use it for myclient’s and I’m not cheap.

Take a look at www.ArtISteer.com .  The trial software is very good for playing around with.

Content including Pages and Blog posts are stored in the table NODE_REVISIONS in the main database of your Drupal installation.  Recently my Drupal site had a massive failure and I was able to go into the MySQL database and recover my posts from this table.  It’s not nice and neat, but if you don’t want to rewrite all of your posts it’s a way to get them back.