Switched to Drupal!

Switched to Drupal!
Posted May 14, 2006 - 7:16pm

Well after a large amount of effort on my part I finally bit the bullet and switched the site from Xoops to Drupal.

At the time of writing many things are probably broken including the following:

High Priority

Survival Guide - most of the knowledge base was transferred - but the Survival guide didn't make it - so far
Committee Guides not complete
Fix book structure - make more like drupal handbook front page
Downloads are not done - but should probably be moved elsewhere - only 3 of them
Signup module needs to be enabled / checked.
Old news is currently not in categories - tried taxonomy_multi_edit but didn't work

Low Priority

URL redirects - need to setup redirects from old Xoops content -- done index.rss -> rss.xml
No pictures in user profiles - need to enable in settings and import old pictures
Calendar - the old calendar content has not been transferred - but the calendar workds
Links to RSS - no RSS feed, podcasts links on the front page
Uploaded files in old forum are not present - except one - the capability exists to do this for new posts - redirect won't work as not in posts - horrible id in old table
No photos on the site yet.
Theme could do with some improvements.
Mailing list toolbox not imported - should be simple - but may be better mailing list integration.
Committee forums are now totally open - nothing in there is sensitive anyway - and not being used really.

Done

No formatting toolbar or wysiwyg function - added optional tinymce.
Front page needs to be sorted out - what do we want on there? -- changed to 2 stories in admin:settings:posts
Embeded videos -- added to filtered html
No Google AdSense as yet. - done
//Frozen bubble -- bye bye.

Let's hope all this was worth it...

‹ short film contest Minor forum change ›

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ajay's picture

Careers node edited & site reindexed.

May 15, 2006 - 2:24am — ajay

Fixed issues:
1) The main page menu was pointing to ./career while the document was at ./careers the latter has been changed to reflect the former.
2) Even advanced search did not scan forum content... reindexed site for search.

To be fixed:
1) Many faulty URLs in Society Guide
2) ** Some of the last forum posts from old site not present in the new version**.
3) Have you every been a UCLA postdoc shows up as just that in a profile... perhaps replace with an icon?

Current site is certainly much faster than the Xoops version... cheers!!!

Ajay

"I refuse to believe that everybody refuses to believe the truth" - Lisa Simpson

ajay's picture

Hello folks,I just spent a

May 17, 2006 - 7:24am — ajay

Hello folks,

I just spent a couple of hours whipping up a new brighter template for the updated SoPS website considering its new functionality. See a screenshot at http://www.postdoc.ucla.edu/node/751?size=_original .

This template offers the main links (currently on the left) in a horizontal toolbar and reverts to a content-focusing two column format with a contextual table of contents block popping up above the login form when relevant (as it does now when you click on guides etc.). I have also suggested that the search box move to the top bar and google ads be restricted to the forum area like many organizational sites do nowadays.

This design is a minimalistic one and offers an easy way to simplify the site... please leave your comments on that post so that I know whether more time should be invested on this project.

Regards,

Ajay

Nice work - I like the

May 17, 2006 - 7:34am — Graham

Nice work - I like the mock', 'Nice work - I like the mock up very much. Unfortunately the civicspace theme is not ready for 4.7 yet but they are working on it:

http://civicspacelabs.org/home/CivicSpaceThemePlan

I'm not sure how that affects your plan as other themes could probably be adapted to look the same.

OR we could just wait until they update it. I'm sure civicspace with a 4.7 core is not far away.

ajay's picture

Drupal theme?

May 17, 2006 - 3:28pm — ajay

I looked around and it looks like the main Drupal website theme itself should be easy to adapt if we have access to it. We can cut past some code from 4.6.x civic space into it for the stylistic parts if required.

Cheers!

Ajay

"I refuse to believe that everybody refuses to believe the truth" - Lisa Simpson

Drupal main theme is not

May 17, 2006 - 6:58pm — Graham

Drupal main theme is not available as they want to keep their site looking unique(ish).

http://drupal.org/node/22429

ajay's picture

TinyMCE

May 22, 2006 - 2:35am — ajay

Filtered HTML leads to bad formatting of paragraphs in richt-text editing. FCKEditor and option?

"I refuse to believe that everybody refuses to believe the truth" - Lisa Simpson

Well done!

June 8, 2006 - 12:38am — dvatakis

You da man! Access denied really bugs me :)

"A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost. " Jean-Paul Sartre

ajay's picture

known unknowns ;)

June 8, 2006 - 3:04am — ajay

At least now you know why you dont get to know what was on that denied page...

"I refuse to believe that everybody refuses to believe the truth" - Lisa Simpson

Fixed bug in forum posts

June 5, 2006 - 5:56pm — admin

Fixed bug in forum posts where UID=0 gave permission denied. Hangover from transfer from Xoops site.

Fixed comment count in forum

June 7, 2006 - 6:11pm — Graham

Forum comment count fixed using:

SELECT COUNT( cid ) , n.nid
FROM `node` n
LEFT JOIN `comments` c ON n.nid = c.nid
GROUP BY n.nid

Dump that into a file then loop through each nid and do:

update `node_comment_statistics` set comment_count='$count' where nid='$nid';

2 hours later - fixed bug

June 7, 2006 - 9:56pm — Graham

2 hours later - fixed bug where no anonymous posts showed up. Added UID 0 user to users table

[EDIT: fixed some anonymous posts appears as being from me.]

Used old xoops tables to show real anonymous posts and updated new tables to set uid=0

ajay's picture

Template Updates and Forum Changes

June 8, 2006 - 2:45am — ajay

Template Updates in the past 2-3 days:
1) New 2-column template made default by Graham.
2) Login box moved from main page - users need to click login.
3) New dotted blue box added to all stories to create separation from the right-column content. Extra horizontal lines removed from daughter links section for each book-page and the book-navigation bar CSS was changed. Double right arrows in all story posts now show as red.
4) Highlighted story box (sticky) made a typical post-it sticky pastel color.
5) News display set to 4 per page and 200 character teaser limit.
6) Caching turned off due to login errors (official Drupal bug).
7) Created new custom 404-Page not found and 403-Access Denied pages.

Forum Changes to reduce complexity of user decision:
1) Since the committee forums are open to the public and not really populated, all the posts have been clubbed together and clubbed with what used to be called "Society" and is not called "SoPS Organizational".
2) The containers were causing redundant breadcrumb entries and have been removed. Now if you are viewing a topic in say advocacy the breadcrumbs read Home>Forum>Advocacy instead of Home>Forum>SoPS Discussion Forum>Advocacy.

To be done:
1) Change calendar CSS to be consistent with site template.

Cheers!

Ajay

"I refuse to believe that everybody refuses to believe the truth" - Lisa Simpson


Thanks Ajay - good

June 8, 2006 - 11:25am — Graham

Thanks Ajay - good stuff.

The only one I take issue with is 5) Teaser limit. This is very limiting for some stories and I prefer to set no teaser limit and then manually set the break point using the syntax. However, there might be a way to ignore the teaser limit using that sytax - so that might be an alternative - will check it out.

Stuff done by me:

1) Removed path alias to /dav/SoPS.ics as this is just confusing. Added RewriteRule to .htaccess to redirect transparently to new location.

2) Fixed several bugs in forum with anonymous users.

3) Set approval requirement for anonymous users.

4) Allowed anonymous users to view print version of guides.

5) Uninstalled signup module for the moment as causing errors in cron.php

6) Fixed invalid HTML & CSS

7) Deleted some spam forum posts

8) Created Rich Text input format with no filters for TinyMCE - yet to assign this to a role as default.

9) Updated Server to install new mysql packages (debian security update)

10) Allowed anonymous users to view user profiles. Cannot see email address but contact tab suggests that they login / register.

ajay's picture

A few more updates

June 9, 2006 - 6:01pm — ajay

1) Calendar CSS made in-theme with rest of the site.
2) Issue with some events being active even after completion and the calendar sometimes showing the next day as "today" was fixed by enabling configurable time zones.

[Edit: the time feature is broken again... need to debug]

Graham, good point about #5 -- the limit was set since having 3 full posts on a page caused a lot of scrolling (scroll-laziness can cause you to miss a few) and some older pages took for ever to load due to embedded movies loading up with the page. It would be great if you can dig up a per-post method... moreover, if we can find a way for bulky images or movies to show up only in the individual node mode, it may get rid of the embedding issues.

"I refuse to believe that everybody refuses to believe the truth" - Lisa Simpson

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