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.

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:

In my previous post, Problem with Gallery Module for Drupal, I mentioned my need to modify data in the Drupal database table "variable". I learned the hard way the significants of the metadata contained in this table.

The table "variable" has two columns: name and value. The value field contains metadata indicating the type of data contained in the field. In my case gallery_embed_uri was:

s:26:"/test1/index.php?q=gallery";

The s:26 means string with a length of 26. So when I changed "test1" to "blog", I needed to also change "s:26" to "s:25" reflecting the shorter string length. Not doing so caused Drupal to fail in spectacular ways without good error messages.

I'm sure there is a reason for storing the length with the string value in the database, but I have not been able to find it online.

Other metadata types are outlined after the jump.

There is a bug in the Gallery module for embedding Gallery2 in Drupal.

When you install the Gallery module, you need to set the "gallery_embed_uri" to the location of the url of your main Drupal handler. (example: "/blog/index.php?q=gallery") If you change the url of your blog, while there appears to be a way to modify the gallery_embed_uri from the administration menus, it does not take. All links from Gallery2 items are to the wrong addresses.

In my case, while my main blog is in /blog/, I had a temporary location of /test1/ while I upgraded drupal and installed Gallery2. Once I was happy with the installation, I moved it to /blog/. Gallery2 continued to point to /test1/ no matter what configuration options I changed.

In the end, to fix the gallery_embed_uri, I had to modify the field in the Drupal database table "variable". Once I made the change in the database, Gallery2 started working perfectly.

Note: xmlsitemap uses the same gallery_embed_uri variable. Until gallery_embed_uri was fixed, all my Gallery2 items in my site maps were bad.

When I first installed Drupal, I had a hard time figuring out which modules I should install. Not knowing Drupal, I did not want to install something that would make my installation non-standard so documentation would be hard to find. I also didn't want to make it difficult to upgrade.

The main drupal index should allow users to rate the modules or maybe have a relative count of downloads to help point new people in the right direction.

Below, I list my favorite modules. The first 4 I would consider vital for any site.

1. Update Status - Lets you know when an upgrade to any part of your Drupal installation is available. This module is so important it has been included in Drupal 6.x.

2. CCK - Content Construction Kit - The basic building block to allow for the customization.

3. Views - I don't know how a Drupal site can be anything but a basic blog without views.

4. Pathauto - Automatically changes your URLs to configurable SEO compliant URLs.

Which is better - Drupal or Joomla? It depends on what you are trying to do and how much time you have to do it.

I have used Mambo, Joomla 1.0.x, Joomla 1.5, and now Drupal 5.x. When I thought I had to upgrade from Joomla 1.0.x to Joomla 1.5 due to server issues (I was wrong... but I upgraded anyways), I did research into the best / easiest CMS to allow me to have a blog and allow Adine to showcase her art.

At first I tried to install and configure Drupal. The learning curve is much, much steeper than Joomla's. After two days, I scrapped Drupal and installed Joomla 1.5. It took me less than a day to build my site in Joomla. I was happy with the results. That is until I realized that I could not get any type of SEO out of Joomla. And since I have given a couple talks on SEO, I was embarrassed for my blog to be that bad with SEO. I also wanted tags and comments. Neither one looked possible with Joomla 1.5rc3 at the time.