Category Archives: Drupal

DrupalCamp Austin 2009

I had a great time this weekend at DrupalCamp Austin, 2009. DrupalCamp was a “Barcamp” styled meetup with a strong emphases on Drupal. At the camp I was introduced to Drush. Drush is the Drupal Shell and provides tools for managing your Drupal projects with shell scripts. I can see great use for Drush at the office to help quickly create new Drupal sites in a standardized fashion. It can also be used to run maintenance scripts.

Other topics included Panels 3, Drupal SEO, and JQuery UI being added to Drupal 7 core. The improvements to Panels in Panels 3 are significant. The prevailing wisdom at the conference was that Panels 3 will replace blocks for most cases.

During the keynote talk, they performed a basic DISC personality assessment on everyone at the camp. The test performed was way over simplified (two questions) and the results over generalized. It was interesting seeing how people reacted to the test. One result that was curious is while about 75% of the attendees consider themselves to be introverts, the conference had their happy hour at a karaoke bar. That did not seem well thought out. Then again, several of us stayed their until 2 in the morning.

Overall, the camp was fun. I met a lot of good people. And I hope to go to another camp soon.

Upgradeing from Drupal 5.20 to 6.14

Today I upgraded from Drupal 5.20 to 6.14. I’ve been dreading the upgrade to the Drupal 6.x series for almost 9 months because I had no idea how hard it would be or what I would lose in the migration.

The instructions on the Drupal site are fine, but they didn’t prepare me for what would be different.

  • Back everything up
  • Deselect all non-core modules
  • Select a core template
  • Move the old Drupal version out of the way
  • Install the new version of Drupal
  • Copy your /files and /sites directory from the old installation to the new installation
  • Copy other misc files like your robots.txt to the new installation
  • Fix the /sites/default/settings.php
  • Run the update script — Pray

If all has gone well, you have an upgraded core. Now for the tedious part. Start upgrading each module one at a time, running your update script between each one.

After upgrading every module that had a Drupal 6.x version, here is what I lost:

  • My site template
  • All my views
  • Most of my custom menu items (Links to anything that did not upgrade cleanly was lost — ie.. links to my views, links to my galleries, etc…)

Differences of note:

  • Drupal 6 is much faster
  • HTML comments started appearing in my stories. I had to install the htmlcomment modules to get my comments to hide again
  • The views configuration menu is much improved
  • Status Report is now part of core
  • Gallery module is much improved
  • The wysiwyg module is more flexible than the old tinymce module

In the end, I am very happy with the upgrade. I still have work as I will need to find / hack a new template sometime so I don’t look like a default Drupal install.