Friendly Expert Drupal Consulting

I’ve updated the site to the newest version of Drupal, and (after some tweaking) most things seem to be working. I’m leaving it with the default theme for now until I decide what look I want to go for.

Let me know if you run into any issues.

By the way, thanks to this Lullabot video for a step-by-step process that makes things relatively painless.

If you encounter a

Call to undefined function module_exist() ...

error, check out this drupal.org article.

UPDATE the old bookmarks are broken at the moment — I’ll have to fix ‘em another time.

UPDATE #2 bookmarks are fixed.

After casting about for information on using the blog editor MarsEdit (from the makers of NetNewsWire), I finally amassed all of the necessary settings to successfully post Drupal stories, retrieve older stories, and assign categories.

Within Drupal

1. Obviously, your Drupal user account must have posting permissions.
2. In admin/modules turn on the blogapi module.
3. Under admin/settings/blogapi set the XML-RPC Engine to “Blogger” and turn on the blog types you want to use. I have “story” turned on.
4. Click the “Save Configuration” button.

Within MarsEdit

Creating a new Blog

Each “blog type” that you activated in Drupal (“page”, “story”, “bookmark”, etc.) is treated as a different weblog in MarsEdit — kind of a pain, but it does make sense.

1. In the Weblogs drawer, click on the + sign to create a new weblog.
2. Enter the blog’s name and URL, then click “Add Weblog”.
3. Click on the new blog’s name in the Weblogs list, then click the “Edit” button below.
4. Some info will already be filled in, but choose “Moveable Type” from the “Software” popup menu.
5. The RPC URL should be something like http://www.yourdomain.com/xmlrpc.php — if blank, enter it here.
6. Enter the word story for “Blog ID.”
7. Click “OK”.

Repeat these steps for each of the “blog types” you set up before, substituting its type in step 5.

Posting to your site

1. In the main MarsEdit window, click on the “Refresh” button.
2. Assuming all has gone well, posts will begin to show up in the window. Categories might show up slower than the rest of the info, so give it a second.
3. Once everything’s loaded, just click on “New Post”, and that should do it.

You’ll notice that the categories listed in the drawer aren’t set up the same way as your hierarchical taxonomy, but everything is there. For example, this post will have the Drupal tag, but it’s actually at geek/programs/drupal in the taxonomy. In MarsEdit, this shows up under programs/drupal, since it seems to be showing only one hierarchical step per “category”. Same thing with the os/mac instead of geek/os/mac.

If you have a relatively complicated taxonomy like mine, or at least one that has a lot of nested terms, this will take a bit of getting used to. If yours is simple, then it shouldn’t pose a problem.

Cool cycling social/community site running Drupal, via knaddison.com:

Your stories. Your photos. It’s all about you and the bike.

It’s a social networking and citizen journalism site wrapped up into one with the niche focus on the mountain biking community. So, you can see reviews of mountain biking products or user submitted mountain biking photos but it’s also got a community aspect in multiple forms such as forums and community events.