After almost two years of running this site on Drupal 6, I finally came to the realization in late may it was time to move it back to WordPress and Thesis.

What brought me to this decision was more than just the upkeep associated with running a simple blog on Drupal…

It also had to do with the complexity of module interdependence with drupal, which on more than one occasion caused numerous problems.

One of the biggest reasons this site used Drupal in the beginning was the power you had over your content. But, now I feel wordpress has more than caught up.

While I had moved quite a few sites from wordpress to drupal … there’s a module for that. Moving in the other direction seemed like more of a challenge.

Yet, a quick search on the internet turned up this excellent post Convert – Import A Drupal 6 Based Website To WordPress v2.7

Setting up a temporary site via MAMP was the first step, followed by downloading the 2.7 version of WordPress from the release archive.

Following the instructions the data was converted in no time at all. Everything appeared to be there and still intact. The next step was to download and update to the latest version of WordPress 3.01.

Followed by installing the Thesis for WordPress theme, a little fine tuning in under MAMP and then it was time to move it over to the live server.

Creating a new database on the server with phpmyadmin seemed like the easier thing to do. Then using phpmyadmin to backup and download the data from MAMP followed by importing it into the newly created database.

There is one gotcha when moving the database from MAMP to your live server and that is the website url. Fixing this is fairly easy, on the live server enter your database via phpmyadmin and click on your wp_options in the first row of data you’ll see.

Change localhost to your website url.

There is still one other area that has to be changed as well on the second page of the wp_options.

Change it to your website url.

Now that the data was on the server it was fairly easy to move all the files over to the server after deleting the drupal files.

Once you’ve moved all the WordPress files and folders – set the permissions edit your wordpress wp-config.php to point to your new database.

You’ll also need to copy the hidden file .httaccess to your wordpress folder.

Of course you could simply install WordPress…

And then import the database from MAMP.

I did find one odd thing in the move and that was with the comments not being in the correct order. Mainly it seemed tied to replys to comments.

Other than that, the move from Drupal 6 to WordPress was just as smooth as moving from WordPress to Drupal.

Ninety-nine percent of the time installing a security update for Drupal 6 is a painless process, it just works. Not this time.

At this point in time I have to say installing Ctools 6.x-1.4 and Panels 6.x-3.4 will break your site and evidently the maintainers do not care at all.

Why would I say that? After submitting a bug report they move it to postponed even after numerous others had the same problem.

Then they simply deleted it. What is it that you have to know after installing these updates and it causes multiple sites to display the dreaded White Screen of Death, when using Views frontpage?

This lack of professionalism of the maintainers in my opinion is despicable. Rolling out a security update that trashes sites, I guess there is no testing until after the fact.

Granted I know that most drupal maintainers are working without any compensation and doing it because of their love of drupal.

The point is if you are using the Views module with the frontpage proceed at your own risk when installing Ctool’s 6.x-1.4 and Panels 6.x-3.4.

Comments have been closed on this post due to the foul writing a few Drupal members have used.

And, if it offends you get over it.

At the beginning of this month I wrote a post about Fusion or AdaptiveTheme and the Drupal 6 theme AT Koda.

What I liked about the original design done by Kodamera and ported to Drupal by Adaptivethemes was the clean lines.

In many ways it looked a lot like one of the early designs I had used for the one of my websites. A site that I always wanted to bring over to Drupal but was reluctant to do so.

The website in question network-marketing-works.com has ranked in the top ten since 2003.

Since it started as a static website and later added wordpress and ultimately the Thesis theme for wordpress I was concerned about maintaining the rankings.

After looking at the clean and minimal code output by Jeff’s Adaptivetheme combined with AT Koda I decided to take the risk even though Koda is still in the dev stage.

A theme in the dev mode to me really doesn’t mean too much; it allows me to modify it to my hearts content.

Moving to Drupal was a time consuming process, yet thanks to modules like WordPress Import it simplified the process.

Pulling in all the static pages from the site where done manually by hand. I did in my research find scripts to import it I wanted more control.

The final stage was to make it as fast as possible, my gut feeling is the search engines as they’ve already stated are and will be factoring this into their algorithms.

They say it’s for a better visitor experience which is true but I also believe it’s for a substantial energy reduction “carbon footprint!”

After the move I had the index page sitting at 282k with Drupal’s standard performance setup. With a Yslow score for small site – blog of B 85, most would probably be happy with that.

I added three modules that made a huge difference CSS Gzip, Javascript Aggregator, and Boost.

After all the changes and a few other tweaks Yslow is now sitting at small site or blog A 99 and google’s page speed of 94/100. I can live with that!

The site has been live with Drupal now for several weeks, no change in rankings even though the link count on the home page has gone from 19 to 70.

Next on the agenda is to implement semantic views, overall I like the clean implementation provided by Adaptivetheme & AT Koda. Now maybe I can get back to writing.

Sometimes I think I know just enough about Drupal to be dangerous. In the next few weeks I’ll be posting a review on Drupal 6 Attachement Views by J. Ayen Green via PACKT publishing.

I’ve played with the views module and I know I’ve just scratched the surface yet I can see that it has tremendous possibilities.

After downloading the sample chapter and reading other reviews online most of them positive I want to implement some of what is covered on my newest Drupal site.

I like the concept of really making the site more interactive for the visitors and making it look truly custom.

If you have not taken a look at it you might want to…

…It might give you some creative ideas like it has me.

Click here to learn more about it.

For the past month I’ve been looking at both of the Drupal Starter themes Fusion and Adaptivetheme. And, I should say I still have more questions than answers.

I’ve been doing my research carefully as I want to move one of my websites, over 500+pages to Drupal. What I originally thought would be and easy choice has become even more complicated.

Fusion to carry everything including the kitchen sink with it, and appears to have a far larger variety of available themes for it. Yet, it seems to be really heavy on the code side.

Which brings the question of SEO into to play “text to code ratio” or should it even really matter.

The themes for Adaptivetheme are fewer and most are still in the dev stage. On the plus side it generates cleaner code which should give it an advantage on the SEO side of the equation.

The question I have for other Drupal users that stop by is “which one would you use and why?”

Would a person be better off to use neither of them and just modify and existing them to their liking?

Share your thoughts or experience with Fusion or Adaptivetheme.

Ok so you know how when you get in a rush, and you install a Drupal Module update assuming everything will be ok.

If we only lived in a perfect world right.

The other day I updated the latest Drupal 6.x Mollom module release 1.11 on three different sites.

It was running late so I really didn’t check my work and ensure that everything was as it should be…

With most module updates if something is not working it’s not that serious and neither was this update, unless…

…You love getting comment spam.

I had assummed (we all know what that means) that it would have picked up the setting from the previous module and applied them…

But, no it didn’t. So you can imagine all the comment spam I found in all three sites today.

I’m not bashing Mollom only myself for not checking out the settings to ensure everything was working properly.

The module continues to do a very effective job in blocking Drupal comment spam.

If you’re plagued with comment spam which every web site is then I highly recommend Mollom.

And, no I’m not being compensated to write this, sometimes you just find something that works as advertised!

Over the past two days I spent quite a few hours trying to figure out why the update for Backup and Migrate 2.2 would not save to the scheduled folder.

Since I had two sites and it was only occurring on one of them I knew it was not the module itself but more likely a permissions issue. This is where I spent most of my time, verifying the various folders permissions, ownership etc…

The Drupal module Backup and Migrate places an htaccess file in each of the folders, manual and scheduled, with:

order deny,allow
deny from all

Both sites as I indicated where setup exactly the same, right down to folders, permission and ownership etc… Yet, one worked and one didn’t.

I could actually go into the file and remove the o from order and generate a 500 server error so I knew that apache was actually reading the file.

Running out of ideas I went back to the main htaccess file for drupal itself and did not see anything different other than awhile back I had created a rule to deny access to a few I.P. Address that continuously tried to access files.

Removing this rule, allowed the Backup and Migrate 2.2 to start working properly. More important is what the newest version revealed to me and that was, before the folders where not secure…

…Ouch.

Wow talk about a night mare, the newly releashed up date for the drupal 6 nodewords 1.7 update is creating havoc with many individuals.

And, yes I was one of them. At first I thought I was screwed because I did not do a backup immediately prior to updating the module.

As I set down to go through each page and post it suddenly dawned on me, dummy you’ve got the module Backup and Migrate installed.

Now it was just a matter of uploading nodewords 1.5 and then restoring the latest backup. Talk about dodging a bullet!

I sure hope other drupal users have a good backup.

Update: For those who like to live on the dangerous side of life, the dev version for drupal 6 appears to update just fine.

Just make sure to create a current backup of your data base and save your previous version of nodewords.

Kind of sounds like a best practice to accomplish at all times.

Latest Update Nodewords 1.8 is out and works great. Many thanks to the module maintainer Kiamlaluno.

When it comes to choosing a theme for Drupal what is it that you look for in a theme?

Over the past three weeks I wanted to give one of my sites a new look. I looked at all the Drupal themes for version 6, there are quite a few that I found intriguing.

I had used a previous theme that had been converted from the wordpress theme Revolution Music by RoopleTheme. Since I had one of the developer packages for the Revolution theme I put the theme into use.

I finally decided that I wanted to go with the LiteJazz theme for my Solar Power site. One of the things that I really liked about it was the implementation of suckerfish menus.

The more I worked with the theme, the more I liked it. I liked it so much that I am now this site as well. While I kept the design changes on this site to a minimum, I made quite a few changes on my solar power site.

So many changes you almost cannot tell that the other site is based on the LiteJazz theme. After changing two of my sites over to the new theme, I decided out of my frustration with wordpress to move another site over to Drupal 6, but I’ll save all the headaches for another post.

While looking at Drupal Themes I also like the theme RootCandy and wanted to implement it for the administration theme on both sites.

This theme works nicely for your administration theme you might want to give it a try. I’m always curious what others are using for a theme and why they chose it over others.

This past weekend I was searching for a way to take the recent posts block and have it display offset posts and limit it to 5 posts.

I found information on creating it by using php code inserted into a block, I was looking for something simpler.

The solution was to start leaning more about the Drupal Views module. So when in doubt it always pays to read the manual. In the Views tutorial there is a section titled “Create a block of author’s recent blog posts.”

Going through the tutorial will give you a greater understanding of the views module and its capabilities. I am already using drupal views with the bonus pack to display the 5 most recent posts on the front page of the site with no pagination.

I wanted a block to display an additional 5 more posts that where offset. The default Recent blog posts as we know shows 10 posts in descending order.

My goal was to have a new view of offset posts that display only on the front page. Then use the default “Recent blog posts” block on all other nodes.

Here are the modified steps I used from “Create a block of author’s recent blog posts” to arrive at this goal.

Creating the View

The first step is creating a view for our recent blog entries block. Because the block will show the titles of blog entries, this view is considered a “Node” type. Go to add new view, enter the following properties, and click Next:

View name
my_recent_blog_entries

View description
List of recent blog entries for a given author.

View tag
blog

View type
Node

Generating the list of blog entries

It will be much easier to see the view progress if we can see it doing something. In this section, we will create a basic view displaying blog entry titles.

1. In the third row of the second column, locate the Fields area. Click the + icon to add a field.
2. Scroll down to Defaults: Add fields, below the settings table.
3. In the Groups drop-down menu, select Node.
4. Scroll down the list, select the Node: Title field, and click Add.
5. Now you will be presented with settings for the Node: Title field. Delete the label from the Label field, that way each individual node title is not prefixed with the word “Title.” Additionally, check the Link this field to its node box.
6. When finished, click Update. If you scroll down to the Live Preview section, you should now see a list of several node titles; however both blog entries and other node types will be in the list. Let’s fix that.
7. In the second row of the third column, locate the Filters area. Click the + icon to add a filter.
8. As before, scroll down to the Defaults: Add filters section, select Node from the Groups select box.
9. Scroll down and select the Node: Type field and click Add. In the settings page that appears, leave Operator as Is one of and select Blog entry under Node type. Click Update when finished.
10. Now, by scrolling down to Live preview, you’ll see that the list only shows blog entries.

A few more things to do before we create the block.

11. We need to add an additional filter by clicking the + icon in the Filters section in the third column second row.
12. Change Groups to Node and select Node: Published. Click Add.
13. Under the Published selection, choose Yes and click Update.
14. To handle sorting, locate the Sort criteria area, just above filters, and click the + icon there.
15. Under Groups, again select Node. From the list of options, check Node: Post date and click Add.
16. In the settings page, change Sort order to Descending. This will place the newer posts on top of the older ones. Click Update when finished.
17. Don’t forget to click Save!

Creating The Block

1. In the first column, under Defaults, there is a select box containing entries such as Page, Feed, and, Block! Select Block and click Add display.
2. Click the Name “None” link under Basic settings and fill in a description for the block in the administrative interface, such as: ‘My Recent Posts.’ and click Update.
3. Next we will put in the offset, make sure you are on the newly created block “My Recent Posts.” Under Basic settings you will see the link Items to display: 10. Click on the 10, scroll down. Here you will see the default value of 10. I set mine to 5 posts, then set the offset to 5. Click Override, then click update
4. Save your work by clicking the Save button at the bottom of the Views interface. You should receive a message that the view has been saved.
5. Next, navigate to the blocks interface and configure the ‘My Recent Posts’ block.
6. I titled my block “More Recent Posts” I only want this block to display on the front page. In the Page specific visibility settings, select “Show on only the listed pages, and set it to “front” click Save Block.
7. Next place it into your choice of left or right sidebar region and click Save blocks.

At first it seems like quite a bit of work but it’s well worth it. And it opens up the possiblities to do the same with “Story” content. With the views module in Drupal, what else can we do?