Submitted by administrator on Sat, 02/02/2008 - 09:28.
Tim from Jethro here.
There have been numerous comments with questions about the new site and whats happening. Please keep them coming - especially if you notice broken things.
However to avoid wasting your time and duplication here is a list of the things we know about and are fixing - some from the comments!
RSS Feeds
RSS feeds are working on this site - but they are different from before. We suggest you change your subscription to the main feed. It is better then the rlp blog feed though you can choose that if you want. Gordon is mostly going to write under his rlp user name. However some content may be posted, e.g., images, audio, video etc., that is not a blog entry and will not be included in the blog feed. For a full list of feeds and to learn how to use them check out the sitemap. For those users who in the past were subscribed to the blog3 feed as mentioned in comments, we will look at the solution of mapping the feed over. However we would prefer they switched to the new feed. Unfortunately some of this can't be avoided. The feeds structure was different in the old version of Drupal. We think it is better now but of course change can be hard.
Subscribers blogs and subscriber content
Gordon and I are discussing just how and what to set up for subscribers. As he mentioned we want to offer subscribers additional content etc. We are just working out the best way of doing this. Feel free to comment with suggestions, ideas.
Audio Posts
We have added the ability to attach audio to a blog post so Gordon can add these into his writing. They will still exist as a separate entry and there is a feed for podcasts that can be subscribed to. This works in iTunes or any other Feed reader that you use for podcasts.
RLP Archives
We have only just got these working - took some time with DNS changes, importing the old database and setting it up to work in a sub folder. However there is a lot of stuff that is not linked up right yet. We will need to manually edit a bunch of links so that they point at the right place. Please be patient as we do this. We would love for you to point out to us broken links as you find them.
RLP Search
At the moment search is operational in both the current site, though there's not much to search on yet, and the archive site. however one search will not find content in the other etc. We are looking into this one.
Bookmark/Search this post with:
Looking good
Thanks for the hard work. I caught the feed change pretty quickly and submitted a request to livejournal to modify the preachermanfeed account to point to the site feed.
Regarding member
Regarding member blogs...What about something like what CrimeSpot does? http://www.crimespot.net/
It's a central page for people interested in mystery-fiction-oriented blogs. The first few lines of the most recently updated blogs are what you're looking at.
Main RSS feed, archives, captchas & Drupal modules
Hi, Tim, and greetings from Melbourne.
Just to be clear, the main RSS feed will pick up podcasts and what-have-you wont it? There is no need to subscribe to the podcast feed separately?
It's a shame that the archive content couldn't be ported over into the new system, making it a more seamless looking transition. Being fairly new to Drupal but learning fast, and interested for my own edification, what were the issues with this?
Can I also mention that the grey boxes around input form fields is extremely faint (at least for me). So faint that I can barely see them...
And just to note, I'm seeing the captcha for entering this comment even though I'm logged in with my own account. Are captchas suppose to only appear for anonymous comments, or is this expected?
And lastly, I'm interested in what non-core modules you are using. I'm waiting until Drupal 6 comes out before setting up my new site proper, but some of the modules I played with in getting familiar with Drupal that I think may be useful for RLP are: Comment Info, Comment RSS, Global Redirect, Pathauto, SEO Checklist, Trackback, Typogrify and XML Sitemap.
You may also consider using reCAPTCHA, allowing the captchas to do something useful for society along with stopping spam on the site!
Peace and chocolate.
Evan
Hi Evan The new main feed
Hi Evan
The new main feed should pick up podcasts as well. the podcast feed on its own is good for mp3 player subscriptions as it only contains the audio and not the rest of the content.
The archive content could have been migrated, but at quite some cost. Being new to Drupal you haven't had the pain of older versions not transitioning well. Drupal has a philosophy of not being backward compatible as a requirement when building new versions. While this means new versions aren't hobbled with the mistakes of yesteryear, there is the counterfoil of sometimes having difficulties with upgrades. In this case there was a major change that required some serious database work. In addition there were a number of quite funky little things in the database that weren't going to migrate at all. Bearing in mind we are doing this for free so economically we and Gordon together decided not to bring content over. That said, Gordon will in due course migrate his essays etc.
I'll point out the gray boxes to Gordon - the theme colouring is his choice. I rather like it but the gray is very faint - i though it was just my old eyes!
Captcha - my fault - should be fixed now - please let me know if not.
Will look at the the modules you suggest. We have a plan to progressively roll out some functions and features as we go.
Thanks for the feedback - enjoy the 4 seasons!
Drupal Modules
Evan
This may be a subject better taken off line. Look me up on the Jethro Consultants website.
Briefly this is a warning of sorts I suppose. I know when I found Drupal I was like "Whoohoo this is cool", and then when i looked at the module page it was, "and I'll have one of those and one of those and one of those" and so on. I learnt rapidly that you can overdose on module hysteria. Remember this is open source with a developer community. While the core application is tested rigourously, the same does not necessarily apply to the contributed modules. Additionally they are not necessarily tested in the configuration you plan to use. In addition to bugs within modules and between modules you need to look at he support queues for issues and upgrade plans. Sometimes developers just stop looking after their contributed modules for whatever reason. Not every module gets upgraded. Its painful when you build major functionality into a site and then there is a Drupal upgrade and they change the way your module works.
That said, we now tend to err on the side of caution rather than loading everything in. Oh and ALWAYS test in a test database first not in a production site.
RE: Drupal Modules, etc.
“Oh and ALWAYS test in a test database first not in a production site.”
Yes, something I keep trying to impress upon one of my more stubborn customers. Some days I'm tempted to lock them out of their own admin accounts. :-)
The captcha has gone now. Thanks.
RE archives: Yeah, I figured it was a something like that. Although new to Drupal, I've been in software development for about 14 years now, so I know what it's like.
Thanks for your insights into the Drupal ecosystem. I'll keep them in mind as I venture out. And thanks too for your efforts with RLP.
Evan
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