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.
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.
I installed three new modules in my efforts to get my blog up to par with WordPress and BlogSpot. My wife Valerie, whose blog is at nothingbetterthanablankpage.blogspot.com, is a heavy user of the scheduling function. She does multiple blog entries then schedules them for daily release. I wanted to do the same thing, so I installed the following: Scheduler - this allows me to set a time to publish any node.
I had several issues I wanted to address with regard to this blog. First, I wanted a tag cloud so that readers could easily find posts based on the tags. I also realized that Drupal's Clean URL's were not producing blog-like, Google-friendly URLs for my posts. So I added three new modules to this Drupal site tonight while watching the Presidential Debate. Path - this is a core module that is required for Pathauto. Pathauto - allows me to automatically set the URL and setup rules to automatically name the URLs. Works wonderfully.
I've become a pretty big fan of Google Analytics and the more I dig into it the more I can learn from the various reports it provides. GoogleAnalytics is just about the easiest Drupal module to install-- it can't get much easier.
I woke up this morning to see 20 comments on two different blog posts, most of them posting a link to see Lindsay Lohan nude. I installed the Drupal Captcha module and configured it to hopefully prevent any more spam. A couple notes about getting this right. For me, the default font was unacceptably hard to read. I had to install additional True-type fonts by creating a fonts folder under the modules/captcha/image_captcha folder and copying in a number of fonts. I used the "liberation fonts" that I had downloaded previously.
I finally set my mind to several things I'd like to blog about, and then I realize I've got this "build-it-yourself" blogging tool called Drupal. I know that I want to insert images into my blog, and I want it to be as simple as WordPress or Blogger. My wife's blog, at http://nothingbetterthanablankpage.blogspot.com, always has pictures in it. Valerie is not tech-savvy but has learned to use pictures to maximum effect.
I was looking around my blog site today and realized that my friend MCarnell had not only created an account for himself but also left a comment on my blog. I had not been notified. There's no doubt that when compared to WordPress, Drupal needs a lot more work to get a decent blog site running. On my Pizza Blog, I am notified every time someone posts a comment on my blog. I want the same functionality on this blog.
I've created this blog in Drupal 6.3, so some of my comments may not apply to older versions of Drupal. One of my goals with this blog is to build it out into a very useful blog that a WordPress or Blogger user would be happy to use it. Out of the box there are a lot of weaknesses. First on the positive side, I was able to install and configure the software in less than an hour and five minutes later I had my first blog posted-- not bad. On the down-side, I was pretty limited in what I could do.
I read something a few months back about a module, Masquerade, that let's a Drupal administrator impersonate other users. This is very useful when testing. You want to be able to see what an anonymous user would see or what a "contributor" can see, etc., which hopefully is just a subset of what the Administrator can see. The masquerade module has no documentation that I could find. Yes, it is pretty simple but still a little quirky.
