drupal

Drupal Camp SC - Presentation Posted

The first ever Drupal Camp South Carolina is coming up this Sunday and I am giving a presentation called "Which Drupal Modules Should I Use?"    The presentation is geared toward people who are new to Drupal and lost in determining which of the 5000+ contributed modules to use.

You can download the PDF or the PPT file at www.broadstreetconsulting.net/ppt.

Columbia Drupal Meetings Picking Up Steam

Monday night we had our third Drupal Columbia meet-up at the Richland County Public Library and had 7 attendees.  It was exciting and very encouraging since the first two meetings were only 3 people. 

Most people attending were new to Drupal but I was glad to see some representatives from Pure Fishing (www.purefishing.com) there.  Pure Fishing is a company that owns several well known fishing brands, including Shakespeare, which has long had a presence here in Columbia, and Mitchell, which has a very attractive Drupal Site at www.fishmitchell.com.  

I spent quite a bit of time explaining blocks and CCK and views, and Bob from Pure Fishing took a few minutes to show us the MagicZoom feature used on the Mitchell product pages.  Very impressive, if you asked me-- here's an example:  www.fishmitchell.com/products/reels/avocet%C2%AE-ii-gold-series.    You can read more about Magic Zoom here:  www.magictoolbox.com/magiczoom

We agreed to have future meetings at RCPL,  6:00 pm on the Second Monday of each month.  The next meetings are April 12 and May 10.  Be there or be square!

 

Proposed Logo for Upcoming Drupalcamp SC

Tommy and I were playing around tonight.  I had an idea for a Drupal SC logo, and he has the Photoshop skills.  What do you think? 

 

Drupal Location Module - Changing to Locative Information from a CCK Field

Recently I've had to do this.  I create a Drupal Content Type using the Location Module and GMAP Module,   I created a Location CCK field and started entering (or importing) location data into the field.

Afterward, I realized that I did not really want a CCK Location Field.  Instead, I wanted to set the Locative information on the configuration page of my content type.  I did NOT want to re-key my location information, and it turns out I didn't need to.  

When you key in Location data to a location CCK field, the Location data is stored in the Location table.  It is stored in the same place when you use locative information.  The only difference is the data that is stored in the Location_Instance table.  Instead of storing a reference to the for a CCK field in genid, it stores the node id in the nid and vid fields.      

I ran the following query to take the node id from the rightmost characters of the genid and use them for the node id, and blank out the genid.  Worked like a charm... 

UPDATE `location_instance`
SET `nid` = right(`genid`,3),
   `vid` = right(`genid`,3),
   `genid` = ''

Indian Trail Golf Course - Nice Drupal Site

I wanted to get a tee time for golf a couple weeks back so I Googled Indian Trail Golf Course in Leesville, SC.  It's a decent course, close to home, and very reasonably priced.  

When I found their Website I was VERY IMPRESSED by the design and particularly the photography.  Upon closer inspection I realized it was a Drupal site.  After all that I was not surprised to find out that it is the work of Poieo Design, my friends Chad and Dave.

Congratulations Chad and Dave on another great-looking Drupal site. 

My Richland County Public Libary uses Drupal

I found out today that the myrcpl.com site is built with Drupal.  Also found out that an old friend and co-worker from Syneractive (Scottie) helps to manage the site.  It's a great looking site and very well done. 

I love the Richland County Libary (or as Poof  would say, the lye-berry), and I love them even more now.  Next time you're in the library, tell them you love their Drupal site!

Using Drupal's Node Import Module

I fell in love with a new Drupal module tonight.   I am working on rebuilding the New York Pizza Finder site (www.newyorkpizzafinder.com).   This site is a database of New York Style pizza places around the country.  It started with my New York Pizza Blog, located at pizza.wordpress.com.  Then it transformed to an Access database and a number of ASP pages and Google Maps integration. 

Then for some insane reason I decided to make it a wiki, so I installed MediaWiki.  This was a terrible idea-- I ended up with a very unstructured database and a site that attracted a bunch of spammers.  The battle with spam was manageable for the better part of the year, but then the spammers started getting smarter and doing multiple updates in rapid succession which made backing out their changes quite laborious, and I finally just shut down the site.

I am now rebuilding it with Drupal, which I believe will be a smart long-term solution for the site.  Today I found a new module called Node Import.  According to the module's Project Page, the module is not quite complete, but I gave it a go anyway.   The function of the module is to allow me to import a CSV file from my desktop directly into a specific Content Type within Drupal, including content types created with the Drupal Content Creation Kit (CCK).

This module worked like a charm.  It has a wizard that walks you through mapping each field in the CSV file to specific fields in the Content Type. 

I'm a new big fan of the Node Import Module.  Thanks to those who put the time into developing it.

FCKEditor Now In Use

Up until today I was using BUEditor for editing this blog.  Functionality is fairly limited.  It seems more geared toward someone who is comfortable with HTML.  Now I've installed FCKEditor and this is my first post using it.  

iSKORPiTX; a Turkish Hacker, has Struck Again

I had a phone call today that a site that I support was not available and their was a very strange home page. Here's what the site looked like: iskorpitx_turkish_hacker_2.jpg After doing a research, it appears to me that iSKORPiTX; does this sort of thing from time to time, every 3-6 months or so. I found one place where someone said he attacked over 20,000 sites in under 24 hours. So what does he do?

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