drupal

Drupal 6 has many enhancements over Drupal 5. The most useful being Drupal 6 can respect your php.ini and suppress fatal error messages and just return a nice polite site off-line message like the one pictured below.

My on-line presence has been feeding people the Drupal BSOD for a few weeks so I thought I'd confirm that I'm still alive and still in search of cake. Of course to do this I've first fixed the BSOD, which deserves at east a committment point for doing it on my Eee in a bedroom otherwise devoid of stuff. Well there's a USB lamp illuminating my keyboard, an overnight bag containing clean underwear and 2 LARP costumes and Pixel is no doubt about to jump on the keyboard, but the wall of tech, the wall of sound and other assorted junk has gone to Doncaster.

The random image blocks on my site are working again. w00t.

and I stumbled on this....

I've been running into the same brick wall for a while, from both a developer's perspective and as a user. There's some big fallacies propagating amongst people who think they know what usability is. Now I'm not going to claim to be an expert, I know more then I did a few years ago when I first encountered the area as part of my formal studies and had a pretty contemptible view of it.

And that's the first trap: a little knowledge is dangerous. If you don't know enough to know how much you don't know, you're never going to be able to make progress.

WARNING! the rest of the article looks at the holy wars surrounding Gnome and phpBB. I'm not presenting an argument for either side of these contentious issues, but looking for ways round the ideolgical issues that cause this kind of stalemate.

I just upgraded the site to Drupal 6. There is likely some breakage I don't know about yet. If you see something, let me know!

With thanks to nordisch.org darix and MrWerewolf

I've been wrestling with a planned migration to lighttpd for a few days now, on the whole I've found it much easier than apache to configure something that works, and for the most part have done it much faster than the last time I had to configure Apache from scratch. The big sticking point was Drupal sites with an embedded gallery2.

I think I've cracked it using some rewrites and the magnet approach, I'm not sure if I've got the lua script right, actually, i'm pretty sure it's not matching the case I had to code some extra re-writes for. If anyone can spot where I've gone wrong I'll love them forever (or at least send them coffee).

Update: After feeding myself more coffee, I fixed it, see #typo below.

I'm trying out the drupal Image, Image Assist and Image Gallery modules. They're cool. There's even a TinyMCE plugin that lets me dynamically add and select images to go in my blog.

The endless headache:

My pages looks different to how it was in [Word/TinyMCE/Xinha]

Since the dawn of word processing, the temptation is to treat an editor like a typewriter and arrange the appearance of the text to match the meaning you are trying to convey.

Yeah i used to love wordpress. Then i tried Drupal and found it did all the things I wish wordpress did. But yes, i'm using Drupal for this site and Scifi.me.uk. I will most likely use drupal for leedsroleplay.org.uk as well.Update: leedsroleplay.org.uk  now drupalised.