I'm a little late sharing this but I just wanted to take moment to mention the very successful Bar Camp Charleston (www.BarCampChS.org).
There were dozens of interesting sessions covering everything from Linux to Web Design to Salsa dancing. There were 3 Drupal sessions. The first was 'Intro to Drupal' which was given by Nikolai Burton. Nikolai runs Charleston Drupal Users Group (http://chsdug.org/) and also presented a session called "A Whirlwind World Tour of Film." Nikolai was asked to do this session att the last minute and he filled in admirably. He presented to a packed classroom of more than forty people and it was a valuable session.
My second Drupal session was at 5 pm when most of us were approaching a brain-dead state after a full day of information consumption. The Topic for this session was 'Drupal Next Steps - an Introduction to Drush & Performance Tuning'. By this time the Drupal crowd had thinned considerably. It didn't help that the time slot put me in competition with he very popular 'How to Make Your Own Beer' session. All in all, it was a very productive day and I want to express congratulations and thanks to the team that made it happen.
We tested Boost on www.busbeetruckparts.com and a test version of www.tylerbrothers.net. Both of these sites have mostly anonymous users and fairly static content. They are both hosted on a shared hosting service. These factors make them good candidates for Boost.
Apache Bench (ab) is a performance measurement tool that comes with Apache. It comes natively on a Mac. If you are using a PC, you need to load the WAMP or XAMPP stack to get Apache and ab. Some links about ab and XAMPP:
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
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!
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.
