chacadwa.com

Lifestream aggregation is an issue I've been pondering for quite a while now. I have multiple blogs and web 2.0 services. Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube and the list goes on. I've been seeking an effective way to combine all of this crud into a single RSS feed so I can share all of it in one place.

And so I've tried a couple of methods. I made some Yahoo! Pipes. I tried rolling everything through my Tumblog. I tried the feed aggregator in Drupal core. And I mostly settled on FriendFeed, especially since Rob Loach wrote a sweet FriendFeed Module for Drupal.

There's a lot of talk about version numbers and the web these days. It seems that people are getting tired of talking about Web 2.0, and want to move on to new versions. I've started wondering if the whole bit about numbering web versions is keeping us from seeing how short-sighted our vision actually is.

I just posted a video over on the HFCC Help Desk Web Site that describes the Drupal-powered web site that we use to manage the college's Student and Financial Management System, lovingly dubbed "HANK" or HFCC's Automated Network of Knowledge. (Yeah, it's weak. Somebody actually suggested an acrostic for EDSEL. My own suggestion of SCMODS never stood a chance...)

The HANK Admin web site is an internal web site centered around Drupal's Project and Project Issue Tracking modules. It also features LDAP Integration for authentication, Forums and navigable Book Pages for user documentation.

View the video: https://dvc.hfcc.net/about/hank-admin.htm

I suppose most readers think that I've abandoned not only this series, but this entire blog. Fear not. The fact is that I've been pondering this last topic for quite some time, and still don't have a really good answer for how to create a front page on a Drupal site.

And maybe that's okay for this series. When I started writing this series, my goal was to help someone go from a blank hard drive to an operating system and web site that they could play with. The goal was never to get anything all the way to production on the first go around.

As we start talking about theming sites, I have to say that I haven't been a terribly big fan of the default Garland theme. Part of this may be the simple fact that using the default theme for any system puts the user at risk of building a site that looks like everyone else's site. In the last couple of days, my thoughts are starting to change on this, as I've found a couple of sites that are based on this theme that, with some tweaking to the header and the colors, actually look pretty good.

Drupal 6 was officially released this week! When I started my current Drupal installation series, I said that Drupal 5 would be around for a while, and I wouldn't jump to Drupal 6 right away. To be fair, I haven't tried out Drupal 6 at all yet. It looks like a very exciting release, and there are many improvements over previous versions. For simple sites that can use mostly core modules, Drupal 6 is probably the way to go at this point.

In my last post, we took a whirlwind tour through Drupal's core modules. Now we'll take a look at some of the contributed modules that you might want to use.

Many contributed modules were created by the same people who maintain Drupal core, but others are not well maintained or stable. I've learned that before using a new module for the first time, it's a good idea to look through the issues queue for that module. Each module page should have a link to view all pending issues. Taking a look here can save a lot of headaches later.

Whenever possible, it's usually a good idea to only run the released versions of a module. However, helpful patches are sometimes only applied to the development version. If a new version of a module is being developed, desirable features may only be available there. Your best bet is to read through the available information and try to determine which version is going to work best for your needs.

Let's start off with the module you absolutely need to install, the Update Status Module. I'm pretty sure this will be a core module in Drupal 6, and it's very helpful in keeping your Drupal 5 sites up to date.

Now that we've discussed using PuTTY to remotely configure your Ubuntu server, let's pick up where we left off with our web site. Of course, I am writing this as a "Drupal for the impatient" series, so you may have already gone off and explored some of your site's menus and maybe even posted some content. If not, feel free to take a break now and go explore. But before you go, let's talk about modules in general for a minute.

Drupal's modular design is probably its greatest strength. Essentially every part of the system is modular, although there are some required modules that cannot be turned off. There are several modules that come with Drupal, and these are referred to as core modules. All of the other modules are known as contributed modules. Either way, modules add functionality to your site. They also add lots of menu options and access control permissions, so be sure to check those out whenever you enable a new module.