Blogs

Today, another person ran into problems with the upload size limit on the site.  If you tried to upload a picture larger than 2MB, not only would the upload fail, but the site would give you a rather useless error about the file being missing.  Sheer idiocy.  So I increased that maximum image size to 4MB.

Drupal has a blog module.  I still haven't decided what the feck I'm going to do with it.  For now I'll probably just use it as a dumping ground for thoughts, inflationary or otherwise, that are too large for Twitter but are just as trivial.

Today I upgraded all of the modules to the most recent versions. I've been lax. Sixteen were in need of update. Tomorrow I'll upgrade the Drupal core to the latest version. First I've got to track down where I made changes to the caching headers so I can recreate them. It's annoying, but a necessary evil. And as unfriendly as it is, I think it's a good design choice on Drupal's part.

I like Menalto Gallery, I really do. Apart from Drupal features, it has almost everything I want from a gallery. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with Gallery 2 as Gallery 3 doesn't have the integration API yet. Blech. And the devs don't seem to think that being able to review a picture before it's posted is an important feature. This is a built-in behavior for nodes in Drupal, so its absence is jarring. Add that to what I'd be missing from the gallery being shoehorned into Drupal, and I've reconsidered my decision.

When I first set out on building this site, I'd resolved that I'd go with a native Drupal solution. But I kept running into the same problems: Any given solution had most of the features that I wanted, but was missing a few. The one that came closest to a complete solution was Acidfree, but near as I can tell it's currently unsupported, and the dev release hasn't been updated in over a year.

So I went with Menalto Gallery.

It's really rather amusing what can go wrong with a web site. Spent much of today tracking down a couple of rather obscure issues, one having to do with the Apache Solr PHP client (perils of using beta software) and the other having to do with a misbehaving DNS server. That one's hacked around for now, still down know what caused it.

It seems that quite a few changes have been made in Drupal's theming system. I've got most of the version 5 theme ported to version six, but the code I used to format the taxonomy list is broken. I've tracked down a semi-replacement, but it's not quite what I want. Feh.

Okay, so something unexpected happened. The main module that was holding me back from building the site in Drupal 6 rather than Drupal 5 upgrades. Acidfree now has an updated version. So I've upgraded the site. It went fairly smoothly. The only downside is that the Content Recommendation Engine is still at version 5, although an update is allegedly in the works. I'm willing to wait for it.

APC caching is installed. The difference in performance is barely noticeable, but it's there. It'll make a lot more impact when the site actually has more than one user on it.

Also took the opportunity to do some database cache tuning. Again, I'll have to revisit once there's some traffic load on. But it's good practice.

Yet another minor version update. This one was painless, not even any database updates.

I'm mildly disheartened that Drupal 6 is already in beta and I haven't launched on 5 yet. Although I know it's not that big a deal. When I started on this and 5 was in beta, it took a long time for the modules to catch up. If I switched to 6 now, it would be another year to get to where I am now, and that wouldn't be good.