System's blog

A while back, I got tired of wrestling with PostgreSQL. Maybe someday, when the module support is better, I'll go back to it. But, after dedicating an evening to working out the kinks and peculiarities, I managed to hack a solution that got the work I'd done so far out of PostreSQL and into a MySQL database.

There were reasons why I chose PostgreSQL as the database on which to build this site. I seem to remember they were good reasons, but they're escaping me now.

Officially, Drupal supports PostgreSQL, and all of the core modules do flawlessly. It's the contrib modules that are presenting a problem. And there are a lot of them. Most of them fall into the category of "nice to have", but there are a few that would qualify as "needed" or what I want to do.

It's done. All of the stories from the old archive have been transferred to the new one. Whew, 200+ total. Now I'll probably chase down a few stragglers that never made it in originally.

OK, maybe it's because I've never actually been impressed by the various CMS search mechanisms before. TikiWiki was slow, CPGNuke is slow and often times out on me. Neither of them had a built-in mechanism for searching custom content. But Drupal handles searching the custom fields I've added to the book module just fine, and does so reasonably quickly.

Granted, it's only in test mode with a hundred items so far, but I'm still quite pleased that I've got full text indexing going on.

I decided to go with PostgreSQL rather than MySQL for this iteration of the site for various reasons that I'm sure you won't find interesting. Drupal is usually deployed on MySQL, but Postgres is supported. It's not a problem for the core modules, but other modules often have issues. Not as many people on Postgre means fewer testers, means problems are less likely to be caught.

Alright, I guess I can use this opportunity to test the Access Control flag. If I ever get access control working.

As I'm entering stories into the archive, I'm trying to fill in "Date written" information. Of course, I can't really know this. I can only know, at best, when the story made an appearance on the internet. If I'm lucky, I have an old copy of the original file with a date stamp. For most of them, I have to go with the date they were posted to the site.

I've loaded a bunch of the stories into the the Archive. It's just the book module with some custom fields. I'm learning a few things about node templates, and discovered that exactly what I wanted to do (list taxonomy terms by category with the node) had already been done and the snippet was readily available. Sweet.

A lot of things are coming together all at once. I've installed Acidfree. CCK's made a major release, with some niftiness added. I'm just learning its ins and outs.

Gotten working on the Story Archive. It'll be based to a certain extent on the Book module. I just discovered that you can add any content type, not just a book page, to the book hierarchy. This makes things quite a bit more interesting.

The Privatemsg module has reached a release for Drupal 5 as well. That'll be handy.

Oh, and the site's now at Drupal 5.1. Gotta keep up with those version revs.

OK, I've come to realize a few things about the site implementation over the past few days.

First, my original vision for the Story Archive was far more complicated than it had to be. The SA has to be a bit custom because I want it to do a lot more than the normal Story content type does. Good for news articles, but a bit sparse for a fiction archive. The revelations:

1) Most of the custom stuff I want to do I can do within the Taxonomy.
2) Much of the rest can be done by adding custom fields to a regular Page content type.

Collaborate.
Listen.

The final Drupal 5 release was a little over a week ago. It was one of the things I was waiting for to really start construction on the actual site rather than just testing things.

I've got Drupal 5 loaded up and running. Time to start building. Right now I still have the default theme, and the following have been set up:

Blogs
Forums
Some Taxonomy terms

A couple of problems in the way: