drupal

Intro

Due to popular request, I've decided to quickly document how we at UNT Web support use squid as a proxy caching server for drush. The main goal was to speed up module updates, and reduce the load on drupal.org and UNT's internet connection. The instructions are based on my memory, and are for Debian, so there may be gaps here and there depending on your experience/OS.

Squid Setup

Installation was super-simple. (gotta love apt) Configuration was also quite simple. Basically, the debian package for squid is setup fairly nicely as a proxy caching server out of the box, and you need only configure access.

I recently had to update a number of drupal installations, some of them quite old. Here is a bash "few-liner" to migrate an install to CVS, making it much easier to update in the future.


cd your_drupal_dir
# replace DRUPAL-6-12 with the appropriate version tag
cvs -z6 -d :pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal checkout \
-r DRUPAL-6-12 new_drupal
rm -rf new_drupal/sites
mkdir old_drupal
for i in `ls drupal`; do mv $i old_drupal; mv drupal/$i .; done
# if you have drush
drush updatedb
# make sure everything's working, then rm -rf old_drupal


Standard disclaimers apply, hope this helps some people!

So David Weinberger gave an interesting keynote this morning, entitled "Is drupal moral?". It was engaging and funny, but I ultimately felt that his conclusion (as I read it) was fairly weak. Essentially, he finished off by asserting that Morality is engaging that that is different from you. Therefore, Drupal is moral, because it provides a means for doing so.

My take is that drupal is amoral. Like any other tool, it can be used for diverse purposes, of differing moral value. For instance, the white supremacist movement could use Drupal to build a social network and engage its members just as easily as Habitat for Humanity can use it to further its mission.

Decided I was tired of having to manually go and look at my posts after I was done writing them... This latest version will open the post under your cursor in your default browser when you type 'o'. whoo! Tested and working on mac os x, could be dodgier on linux/windoze - leave a comment if you have trouble...

My blog is back from the dead! Well, maybe for the day, anyway... (had the day off from work because of an ice storm) I decided to jazz it up a little, and installed the excellent nitobe theme. It's pretty much bone stock, except for the header images, which were all taken by me or my wife. If you're curious where any of them were taken, just post a comment and I'll be happy to tell ya...

Thanks to a suggestion on an earlier post, I decided to extend the infamous VIM blogging client to all content types. It now comes with the capability to edit pages and stories by default, and it's easily extendible to other content types. (though you're restricted to editing the title and body, it won't do custom fields!) I suppose this would make the version number something like 0.03-rc2? Here's the (by now) de rigeur screenshot:

A few posts (and many weeks) ago, I alluded to my hope of coming up with a decent way to integrate free tagging (folksonomy), Drupal, and xmlrpc. I looked into trying to extend the existing blogapi module to fit my needs, but discovered that it isn't simple to over-ride core functions in Drupal. Essentially, one must copy the entire module from core to the local modules directory and hack on it. Less than ideal, and not too many people are going to want to mess with it.

I've made a few improvements to my Drupal blogging client, first spoken about here. It now has the ability to publish and unpublish posts, delete posts, and create and edit free tags (folksonomy). The free tagging feature requires a module that I've packaged up for parsing tags in the post body - just waiting on permission from the author of the sample code I modified before posting that. Hopefully it'll be coming soon!