Aaron Swartz notes that the stimulus bill requires that each government agency report the money they give out with Atom or RSS.
For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.
Furthermore, the recovery.gov website is based on Drupal.
I’ve cleaned up a few more issues with the Drupal to WordPress conversion. The major remaining issue is converting users. If I can get an acceptable solution for users, I’ll set up a public test site. I may just have to require all users to reset their password the first time they log in.
One common issue when switching content management systems is changing permalinks. If a lot of sites link to specific articles, all of their links could get broken. However, there’s a very simple solution with WordPress. Go to Permalink settings and create a custom link structure of /node/%post_id%. The article URLs will then remain the same as they were with Drupal.
Most WordPress themes include the full article on the home page, but for MacMegasite I’d like to have only an excerpt. That’s also very easy to fix: in the theme’s index.php, look for the_content() and change it to the_excerpt().
If you’d like to try out my conversion script or have any ideas to improve it, it’s available at drupal2wp.php.
I’ve started testing the Drupal to WordPress migration using a local copy on my Mac. Using D’arcy Norman’s script as a starting point, I was able to convert most of the content. I still have a lot to clean up. Once I work out some of the problems, I’ll set up a test site for MacMegasite.
I’m becoming very disappointed with Drupal, due to version 6′s lack of backward compatibility. A lot of very basic modules still haven’t been upgraded to work with Drupal 6, yet they’re already working on Drupal 7. I still haven’t upgraded any of my sites to Drupal 6 and I probably won’t upgrade them. I doubt if I’ll be able to upgrade to version 7 either, without first upgrading to 6.
Corey Smith wrote about moving from WordPress to Drupal, but I’m thinking of going the opposite way. Daniel first brought up the idea of moving MacMegasite to WordPress, which I discounted at first because it would lose a lot of functionality.
I would be losing the forums, buddy lists, the point system, and some of the less-used features like feed aggregators & user blogs. Some of these features could be implemented with WordPress plugins and a separate forum system. The most critical feature is the ability to have multiple authors, which WordPress supports.
On the plus side, WordPress is a lot more attractive, with more professional looking themes, and a much nicer content entry screen. I’m concerned that WordPress seems to use more GPU according to MediaTemple’s GPU usage report. My Drupal sites use anywhere from 0.0005 to 0.0014 GPUs per hit, while this site uses 0.0017 or more GPUs per hit. It may be a due to the plugin configuration.
I’ve seen a few articles about moving from Drupal to WordPress, so I know it’s been done. It would be a big project, so I probably won’t do it until after I finish my current projects and release the iPhone apps I’m working on.
I noticed something very unexpected in my MediaTemple account GPU usage report: an unusually high number of hits for /user/register and /user/login, which I would expect to account for little or no usage. The only explanation I can figure is spambots attempting automated logins & registrations.
I just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.6 and MacMegasite to Drupal 5.8. Both upgrades were quick & painless.
A lot of the news I post at MacMegasite comes from prMac. Until now I received the news articles via email and would clean up, reformat, and post the items manually. Recently the people at prMac released a Drupal module that automatically retrieves and post news. For the last few days I’ve been having it automatically post news, since I haven’t been available to post anything myself.
I’m starting to get pretty disgusted with Drupal 6. I took another look at it today and the module compatibility situation is still dismal. Common modules like CCK and Views still aren’t fully compatible with Drupal 6. For MacMegasite, I would lose the buddy lists, user points, and custom home pages. The situation is even worse for WorldBeatPlanet and my2unz, where I depend on media support and custom node types.
I realize most of the Drupal modules aren’t developed by the core team, but they should make an effort to work with module contributors to ensure compatibility and officially support some of the more critical modules such as CCK & Views.
I’ve been trying out Drupal 6.0 and it looks like this will be one of the most painful upgrades. I tried it with a local copy of MacMegasite and I found that it broke almost everything.
I don’t use too many modules, but I use some pretty basic stuff like user points, buddy list, bbcode filter, adsense, service links, and twitter. None of them are compatible with Drupal 6 yet. It’s been in development for over a year, and most modules still haven’t been upgraded to work with it.
I avoided using betas of 6.0 because of the module compatibility problems, and I find that the problem still exists in the release version. It looks like I won’t be upgrading any of my sites too soon.
Drupal 6.0 has finally been released. This weekend I will probably start working on upgrading MacMegasite, since it will be a lot more straightforward than worldbeatplanet or my2unz, which depend on a lot of extra modules for content types and features.
Some of the enhancements in Drupal 6.0 I’m especially excited about include:
The third release candidate of Drupal 6.0 has been released. I’ll probably try it out on my local machine this weekend. I should be able to update MacMegasite without too much trouble since it doesn’t use too many modules. WorldBeatPlanet & my2unz.com, on the other hand, use some modules that have aren’t compatible with Drupal 6.
I switched to a new theme & logo at MacMegasite, and I also de-cluttered the sidebars. I’m still looking at more themes and working on the logo, so I may still change it if I find something I like better.
The last few days I’ve looked at a lot of WordPress & Drupal themes. Almost none of them are truly ‘ready to go’. I always find little bugs such as misaligned list items or conflicts with various modules. I also found that many of the WordPress themes that claim to be widget-ready really aren’t.
I’ve made a few changes at MacMegasite and there will be more coming in the next few weeks.
First of all, Daniel Brusilovsky is officially a staff member! Hopefully we’ll add more staff this year. Look for a staff bio page to be added soon.
I’ve also added the mysite module, which lets users set up their own ‘my macmegasite’ page with their favorite content, on the style of iGoogle or PageFlakes.
I’ve cleaned up the user registration system to check for valid email addresses and purge any users who don’t activate their account by clicking the link in the registration email. As a result, several hundred user accounts that were never activated and never logged in have been deleted.
My MacHeist referral seems to be paying very well, and after that’s finished I will have additional paying sponsors.
I’ve adjusted the cache settings and added the Block Cache module to MacMegasite, which seem to improve the performance. I’ve also had to increase the memory & CPU for my DreamHost Virtual Private Server several times in the last few days when the load got too high. Hopefully with the cache changes I won’t have to increase it any further.
Anyone can now register at my2unz.com, although the site is still in beta and not feature complete. I’ve finalized the database structure and cleaned up a lot of stuff. Uploading iTunes playlists & exported libraries should be a lot more reliable now.
Other site features include music discussion forums, buddy lists, and private messages, I plan to add a way to view all tracks owned by a member, and rate tracks & artists by popularity.
I’ve uploaded the changes to the live my2unz.com site and updated the database. All of the original content is still intact. I disabled playlist import, however, since that feature hasn’t been thoroughly tested.
I’m now using standard CCK fields & standard views, along with the content template module for track, album, artist, and playlist forms rather than defining those content types in my iTunes module. I now only use one custom table, which links tracks to a playlist and includes playlist specific info for that track such as rating & play count, since it was easier & cleaner than using one of the node relationship modules.
As soon as I have the iTunes playlist import cleaned up and a fast, clean way to create playlists from scratch without importing, I plan to open the site publicly. The other major feature I plan to add is linking albums & tracks to Amazon & iTunes Music Store, and providing audio for tracks, most likely from last.fm.
Things have been pretty quiet with my2unz.com lately, but I have some big programming changes planned. I finally got a chance to do some work on it over the weekend.
The site uses a custom Drupal module for iTunes integration. In addition to importing iTunes playlist or library XML files, it also defines several content types for tracks, albums, artists, and playlists. I use a few custom tables to link artists, albums, and tracks. The module also defines the forms & views for those content types.
I’m eliminating those content types from the module and converting them to standard content types using CCK node reference fields and standard views. The itunes module will simply act as a helper and will still handle importing iTunes data. Hopefully I’ll be able to preserve the existing site content.
I would like to open it to the public before the end of the year. I was originally planning to wait for Drupal 6, but it’s still far from ready and most of the modules I use aren’t compatible.
Drupal 5.3 was released with several important security fixes. I upgraded both MacMegasite & WorldBeatPlanet. The upgrade took only a few minutes and was painless.
Asides
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