News @ Gameslate

Views 2 reaching its second beta release for Drupal 6 is promising. =)

I may revoke my decision to just move along without it. I'm still torn over whether I should add another delay to my schedule. I'd need at least Views and Organic Groups in stable and upgradeable condition for Drupal 6.

Despite my little frustration rant being mistook, I do have enthusiasm for Drupal still. There's no question over whether I'll stick with it, but whether I continue to upgrade and keep pace is completely dependent on the migration issues eventually getting resolved, which I'm feeling pretty cynical about.

A CMS in particular is something that I want to run smoothly and not have to spend a great deal of time and energy maintaining. To be clear, this is my point of frustration: Drupal doesn't upgrade or migrate easily, if it did then waiting for modules wouldn't be an issue. Views & CCK make it even more difficult, data could be stored and presented in so many different ways.

The big question for myself and the lurkers that I know are following this, is whether I just go ahead with Drupal 5 or wait some more for the key modules I need for Drupal 6, because I'm going to feel pretty stuck to one or the other.

In many ways, it's easier to wait. I can certainly occupy my time elsewhere (my gf is moving in, trust me I have lots to do, plus Age of Conan is coming soon *grin*), but I'm not a mañana person, I like to get things done and wrapped up so I can move on. I think here though, frustrations with delays need to give into the wisdom of patience. =)

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. =)

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.