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Drupal Sausage Making

I’m experimenting with a forum limited to admins so we can have tech conversations without freaking people out.

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48 Comments

  1. archivist archivist August 12, 2010

    I FTPd the latest CCK module (6.x-2.8) to fix the security warning, and everything on the Modules page reads correctly except the “Content” component. Do I have to disable everything that depends on that, then re-enable it to get it to recognize the update?

    Won’t that kill everything else? Maybe I should just put the site in maintenance mode beforehand and take my chances? What do you guys think?

    • Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 12, 2010

      Drupal is weird sometimes with it’s updates. I’d say to put it in maintenance mode (and make sure we have a page to let them know we are under maintenance) when there is something big like the CCK or other big modules but not really the small ones.

      I suppose it just depends on how many things each module touches to do it’s job

  2. Ceejay Writer Ceejay Writer August 12, 2010

    Oooh.  *blink*  I’m an admin?

    • Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 12, 2010

      Actually no you aren’t, but you are a moderator.

  3. Ceejay Writer Ceejay Writer August 12, 2010

    Ah! *laughs*  I didn’t know I was a moderator either.  Okay, techies, carry on! *sneaks out the side door*

  4. Archivist Archivist August 12, 2010

    Oh and another note – I enabled the Image Import module when I was mucking around with image problems last night, and suddenly realized I can import all of the Ning’s photos into the new site in one move. I could set up a new archive gallery and import them in next week after we close the Ning to new posts. The only limitation is disk space, but we have loads of that.

    On second thought, the comments and descriptions and tags won’t come along if I do it that way. Now that I know I can import slugs of MySQL data directly into the Drupal DB, maybe we can get clever and import the nodes wholesale somehow. Hmm.

     

     

    • Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 12, 2010

      Nice. That should come in handy.

      Do you think we should make a whole forum for bug reports/admin workings where people can post individual reports and we can work on them in the back ground/have private admin type discussions on individual issues that arise?

      I mean having one thread is okay but eventually it will get huge especially now that we’re just starting.

      • Blackberry Harvey Blackberry Harvey August 12, 2010

        Yes, and an official way to turn a report into an action item and work on it.

        I know we can have a group to-do list somehow. Or archivist, if you’re willing to install Bugzilla on this server, I have lots of experience administering it, and we can make our bug tracking more official.

        • Archivist Archivist August 12, 2010

          Sure, we could do Bugzilla. What if we just created a new kind of node within Drupal? The only thing it wouldn’t do automatically is assign ownership, but maybe we could make that happen too?

          • Blackberry Harvey Blackberry Harvey August 12, 2010

            I think we can create a new content type. I just don’t know what goes into that. There must be a native bug list module for Drupal, though Bugzilla gives us a bit more control.

              • Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 13, 2010

                Actually I like that. Would be goodto have and easy that way to figure out what needs to be done and what is done.

                • Blackberry Harvey Blackberry Harvey August 14, 2010

                  Added Project module.  I guess it needs its own page to be on?  I’m not sure how to set that up.

                  • Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 14, 2010

                    From the looks of it we “create” a project like content and build fromm there.

              • Archivist Archivist August 13, 2010

                Oh I like that too. Let’s try it.

  5. MichaelD Mannonen MichaelD Mannonen August 12, 2010

    I did not realize i was an admin or a moderator….

    • Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 12, 2010

      I think everyone who joined us in the early testing phases have become Admin’s or Mod’s.

    • Archivist Archivist August 12, 2010

      It doesn’t look like you are, sir. Can you see a “Moderator Shortcuts” menu in your right-nav when you log in?

      • Archivist Archivist August 12, 2010

        *whew* So it looks like you’re a regular user.

        • MichaelD Mannonen MichaelD Mannonen August 12, 2010

          A regular user that has access to a blog or forum he should not. (I think)

          • Archivist Archivist August 13, 2010

            Well, yes. A separate problem. :-)

  6. Ceejay Writer Ceejay Writer August 12, 2010

    Not to burden this thread with more side-stuff, but I think it would be good to clarify the admin/moderator question.  I appreciate the faith shown in letting me have access to the controls, but I really do not want to be a moderator.  I resigned from that position at the old Ning right around the Mayoral elections, and I am but a minor character in town these days. I refuse to get into any authorative discussions with Babbage townsfolk. 

    Could I be cut loose from any perceived responsiblities and returned to civilian status?  *bats eyes*

     

  7. Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 12, 2010

    I do have to say one thing. I really do like the look and feel of this site so far.

    I mean I really think we got it as close to the ning as possible with a few improvements. Now comes the work of more improvements.

     

  8. Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 12, 2010

    So is this under the group now and can only be seen by members of the group or can anyone post to it still?

  9. Ceejay Writer Ceejay Writer August 12, 2010

    Lets see if I can post, now that I am a civilian!  *grin* I can still SEE the group.

    • Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 12, 2010

      It’s because it isn’t listed as private yet. I guess everyone can currently see the group and these comments.

      *waves to everyone*

      • Otenth Paderborn Otenth Paderborn August 13, 2010

        /me waves. I’ve seen it all along, and, if you see this, can also post.

  10. Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 12, 2010

    Okay new bug I noticed… Apparently an update somehow put Mara Razor as Stargirl image and link.

    Also I’ve noticed the link to the Bug Report and Feature Request links at the bottom of the page seem to no longer be there. Wasn’t sure if that was on purpose or not.

    [edit] Actually that’s not apparently the problem. It’s there…. just way down there. Something with the blogs view nod screwed up somehow and moved the avatar images and the “view all blogs” link way down to the bottom.

    • Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 12, 2010

      I’ve noticed something else. I have my history turned off at work and when I load the the home page for the first time it looks perfectly normal. It’s just when I refresh it that it gets all wonky.

      • Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 13, 2010

        I tried this with IE at work (since it is a PC rather than my Mac at home) and noticed something else. This error doesn’t occur but the Latest Activity stream isn’t there at all… Just tried a second time when it first loaded it was there but after a refresh it disappeared. So I am beginning to think that the Latest Activity stream is somehow messing up the front page.

        • Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 13, 2010

          Image of the problems:
          [img_assist|nid=204|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=640|height=632]

  11. Archivist Archivist August 13, 2010

    Okay I just unticked the checkbox that says “Public. Show this post to everyone, or only to members of the groups checked above. Posts without any groups are always public.”

    I thought that meant “if you tick this it will show it ‘only to members of the groups checked above.'” I figured if no group was checked everyone could see it, but that if a group is checked only group members could see it. Apparently not. Let’s see what happens now.

  12. Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 13, 2010

    We should probably invite the Mods and Admins to the group too just so the can see it if they can’t that is.

  13. Archivist Archivist August 13, 2010

    Okay – Drupal 6.19 and CCK 6.x-2.8 are in place. No errors. If you notice anything weird let me know.

  14. Blackberry Harvey Blackberry Harvey August 13, 2010

    The in-world kiosk is in place.  Click on “SecondLife Terminals” in the sidebar to locate it.  We can now create a “pending” user group, set all new accounts to pending status, and promote them once they’ve linked their Drupal account with their SL existence.

  15. Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 13, 2010

    Okay just noticed another oddity and could be the reason for some avatar images not showing up on the front page. Blackberry’s AV pic here is his SL pic, Blackberry’s AV pic on the home page is the black bunny he had previously.

    I’m wondering if the AV pics are just not updating quick enough or I know since the AV pics are named the same for each user that clearing out cache should do it but in truth it shouldn’t show two different images for the same person in two different places a simple refresh should refresh the cache anyway typically.

    How often does the cron update and do you think that might have anything to do with it?

    Seems like Paragraphs are off again as well.

    [Edit] Trying Paragraphs without Rich-Text

    • Blackberry Harvey Blackberry Harvey August 13, 2010

      It seems like the front page uses the first image I had, and all other pages use the current image. Archivist, is that something controlled by asquare bracket tag in the layout?

      • Archivist Archivist August 13, 2010

        The Activity module stores a fixed HTML string in the DB when certain events occur. There is no token for [user-picture] available to the system at that point, so we have to guess what the picture is from the available tokens. What I did is to reconstruct the path to the user’s thumbnail, as in “/imagecache/avatar_tiny/pictures/picture-[uid].jpg” … where [uid] is the user’s ID.
        The problem is that we *also* don’t know whether a user has a JPG or PNG image/thumbnail at that point. Ipicked JPG, sort of randomly. So if a user has a PNG thumbnail the image breaks. If a user *had* a JPG thumbnail, the activity feed references it, even if they later switched to PNG.
        I put a comment in the image section of the Profile page that “PNGs are not supported,” but that’s easily missed. I’d love to do some errorchecking to prevent PNGs from being uploaded, but there’s no obvious way to do that. The best solution is to somehow make the image token available when the activity log is stored, but I have no idea how to do that. Any suggestions would be welcome.

  16. Cyan Icewolf Cyan Icewolf August 13, 2010

    A few avatar and image things I’ve been looking through.

    http://drupal.org/project/unique_avatar – This one could easily help with the avatar problems of caching.

    http://drupal.org/node/679410 – This shows how to do a few more views of avatars without the avatar block (so we can get a list of showing the new members if we want)

    http://drupal.org/project/imagefield_avatar – This looks interesting

    http://drupal.org/project/image_fupload – Multi Upload

    Still digging right now as Drupal is a hard site to search through sometimes.

  17. Blackberry Harvey Blackberry Harvey August 14, 2010

    Apparently the event time zone bug may go away if we simply have no end dates on our events.  Who wants to give it a try?

    • Blackberry Harvey Blackberry Harvey August 14, 2010

      Tried it and it doesn’t help.
      But I’ve checked every setting on the site and in the events, and things SHOULD be displaying correctly.
      Is the server itself that this site is running on set for a particular time zone? It seems that the event data table stores the time as an offset to the server time.
      If you can get into the views table itself and edit the SQL query text for the upcoming_events_fancy view, for now we can simply replace it with this:
      SELECT DISTINCT(node.nid) AS nid, event.unix_event_start+10800 AS event_unix_event_start, event.unix_event_end+10800 AS event_unix_event_end, node.title AS node_title FROM node node LEFT JOIN event event ON node.nid = event.nid WHERE (node.type in (‘event’)) AND (event.unix_event_start >= ***CURRENT_TIME***-39600) AND (node.status <> 0) GROUP BY nid ORDER BY event_unix_event_start ASC

      • Archivist Archivist August 15, 2010

        Re: Is the server itself that this site is running on set for a particular time zone?
        >> Maybe, but it’s located on the east coast so if anything it would be be three hours *late*.
        Re: tweaking the SQL
        >> *gulp*! What scares me about that is that the dates are clearly in the system correctly (which is why they show properly on the node). Better to tweak the output to just add three hours after the data data comes *out* of the DB. The problem with *that* is that the date data isn’t coming out in unixtime, it’s preformatted. And I can’t figure out how to tweak the view to get just the raw unixtime.

  18. Blackberry Harvey Blackberry Harvey August 14, 2010

    Whenever I edit a comment, it converts it to HTML formatted text and includes lots of CSS markup.  Then when I save the comment, it treats the HTML as raw text and displays it rather than actually implementing it.
    When I disable rich text, it removes that formatting, but it also deletes all blank lines from my comment and strips out any blank lines I try to put back in.

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