News @ Gameslate

Update: Nope, I'm second-guessing this again.

. . .

Following my ponderings and expelling of frustrations last week, I'm bitting the bullet and moving ahead with Drupal 5, something that in hindsight I should have done months ago. Ahhh well, it's easy to look back isn't it. Now it'll feel good to get back to the grindstone.

My priority will be on moving the main Gameslate community features to Drupal over the coming weeks. I'd like to get the guild features in especially, since Age of Conan will be launching on May 20th. I'll be experimenting with different configurations with the Organic Groups module until then.

Gates Motel will come afterwards, I'm not feeling super rushed on it and would rather spend the time to get it running nice and stable like it once was. I realize after all this time that Gates isn't likely to gather the large community that it once enjoyed, aside from the time spent in a half-assed state, casual gaming has plenty of other popular avenues these days. Still, long live old BBS ports!

In the long run, it would be nice if Gameslate can carve out a niche for itself within game-centric websites. I don't necessarily want to compete with the big media offerings, the portal communities or the recent game-related blogs, but I would like to provide a cozy place for gaming peeps to gather around.

Now I just need to juggle this with other stuff that I've got going on. =)

After months of waiting for Drupal 6 to get up to speed, I'm getting sick of waiting.

The worst part is seeing Views 2 and other key supporting modules flounder while the core Drupal team rushes on to Drupal 7 before 6 is even usable.

Slow down, seriously. This is one recent adopter who's disappointed with the headlong pace and the near abandonment of what's just come out the door. I realize it's exciting and probably profitable to you, but when the codebase is a moving target and the next version significantly cuts into current development to the point of current = incomplete... well that seems an obvious Catch-22 problem to me.

Freeze 7 and finish up 6. You called it complete, but it isn't. You cannot complete 7 anyway since these are modules planned for the 7 core.

I'm not a site-designing company, so I'm not profiting from the steep learning curves, accelerated development and problematic upgrade paths. Overall I think the software is well designed, but the priorities of the companies that fuel most of the development are beginning to sit poorly with me.

Edit: I'm going to clarify here, because at least one person misunderstood the paragraph above. I'm not accusing anyone of being money-grubbing greed mongers. It's just that money and business tend to act like glue in regards to priorities such as these and that means the situation may be stuck this way./Edit

Granted, some of the forward-thinking features brought me to Drupal in the first place, but I'd just like a stable and complete platform to work with. It puts me at unease to realize that's two versions before what's being developed now.

This is me grumbling a little before I just make do with Drupal 5. I'm already past my original deadlines and Drupal 6 looks like it will still be stalled for awhile.

Following the holidays pause, I've been a bit stalled (the past two months, eeep) on my server backend work because of the pending release of Drupal 6. The current-at-the-time Drupal 5 was lacking some features in 6 that I really wanted.

As of today, Drupal 6 has been released.

Now however, the new pause is the wait for modules to catch up. Most notably Views and Organic Groups, both of which have been pretty integral to my site designs so far. Hopefully it shouldn't take too long for these modules to rework new versions for Drupal 6.

I see that Drupal 6 has reached Release Candidate status. That has me pondering a possible upgrade before I even complete my project(s).

I tried Drupal 6 Beta 3, in fact I did so before I installed Drupal 5. I was impressed, it seemed compact & streamlined, yet feature-rich. Drupal 6 gave me an impression of a more professional and complete (-ish) CMS than 5, at least from my short introduction to it. But Beta 3 also had a great deal of bugs and noticeable gaps. If those holes have been patched in this short time, well colour me impressed with the Drupal development community, because it's been a quick ride thru Beta 4 and now RC1.

Like a lot of people though, the biggest hesitation in moving ahead with Drupal 6 is the status of key contributed modules, which is reflected in the RC1 announcement. The biggie of course is Views, but other notables include CCK, CAPTCHA, Pathauto, Advanced Polls, and Privatemsg. Hopefully these modules will get upgraded soon, now that the first RC is out.

I'll be keeping an eye on the status of these modules and more. Meanwhile, I'll have to be patient and keep working with Drupal 5.x.

There.

*brushes dust from his hands*

I've finished porting over MMOROG to Drupal.

It was a bit more work than expected, this wasn't a simple and quick data transfer between blog software, but the reward to effort ratio is pretty high and I'm very pleased with the directions I can move MMOROG in now.

That site has had a long history, I consider it my morphing home on the web since '94. Oh initially of course it was just a homepage in the ancient sense, but I updated my commentary on it so often that my friend Xandria finally convinced me to move to a blog format (we called it journaling back then, lol not so long ago) in '99. It migrated from a funky and ill-conceived cache-driven archive to Movable Type and then Wordpress and now I'm looking forward to its healthy future with Drupal.

Basic site timeline:
Blog / Site Transitions: Rog's page » Rog-Cam » NecroRogIcon » MMOROG
Software: Static pages » Custom PHP » Movable Type » Wordpress » Drupal

I've cleaned up the CSS and markup of the page considerably, opting for full XHTML strict instead of the old HTML 4 Transitional. The CSS validates. The XHTML layout validates, but the content is bound to break validation unless I go through and individually clean up every article (the old Movable Type ones are particularly munged). There's also a line from the webstats software I use (Visitors, configured to document screen resolution) that is really disliked by the validators, but that's a necessary evil because it's specifically tracking the errors for its data.

I'll happily be adding new stuff to MMOROG soon.

Okay time to work on the next site. =)

I'm about to backpedal on a choice I made a couple of weeks ago regarding the "multisite" structure for Gameslate plus its subdomains. I've wandered down the path a bit with Domain Access (a Drupal module), but now I'm struggling with some issues.

I could easily see Domain Access becoming an important part of Drupal overall, because solutions are needed to extend the flexibility of the Views + CCK everything-as-a-node paradigm into multisite configurations. But it's not quite there yet and the developer has a specific focus for what he wants it to do, which is more about affiliate subdomains (Skirt.com is the example with its location-based subdomains) than the wider variety of content sites that I'm wrangling.

The original problem:

I wanted one set of forums that could be used (and themed) across multiple sites. Since Drupal's forums are constructed from nodes + comments, they share the same database tables as any other Drupal content, which gets sticky using Drupal's standard prefix method for multisites. I'd like to have centralized forums, but without centralizing the rest of my content thankyouverymuch.

Domain Access solves that by flagging content for each subdomain. But the one-site = all method becomes monolithic as I add modules for each site under one big umbrella. Drupal loads every configured module at runtime, which makes me shudder when I imagine how that will add to the already heavy load I've seen during benchmarking.

I can keep sanity by using the simpler prefix method, at least in regards to compartmentalizing Drupal's module loading.

I'll have to find another solution to my forums dilemma.

So far most of my efforts here have been either learning, or tweaking / fiddling with stuff. All of the little things add up for sure, I've been at this awhile already. Here's the first big task though: migrating the data from my old blog on Wordpress to Drupal.

If I were transferring between most any other blog software, it would be easy. Wordpress, MovableType, b2evolution, TextPattern, etc. all convert well between each other, most of them include a healthy dose of import/export tools or the solutions are readily available via plugins.

But ugh, Drupal's modular nature comes at a price: it doesn't play nicely with the others. The few Wordpress->Drupal conversion programs that I found were outdated or assumed a very basic setup on both ends. Granted, my Wordpress install is customized a fair bit, so I can't blame it all on Drupal. Regardless, I'm coming to the realization that a personal solution is all that's going to cut it.

Thankfully, I enjoy mucking about in SQL. Multiple join queries are my element.