Drupal 6.4

After much hubbub I have upgraded to Drupal 6.4. I know for the future that I will need to do upgrades through Simple Scripts. Because of my inexperience, I pretty much had to re-setup vfranklyn.com from scratch. Ugh.

Now that I've hopefully been able to put a halt to work projects, I should be able to do more work on this project.

Drupal Support is Awesome!

I've only been working on vfranklyn.com for a few days and I've been going by the book, but already I've run into two problems:

1. DHTML Menu - contrib module settings don't display the way the book said it would.


2. Clean URLs - going to Administer after enabling this gave a 403 Forbidden error.

But hey, no worries! I went to Drupal.org, searched for both problems and found solutions that worked!

So far I'm very happy with Drupal and its community.

vfranklyn.com

I just purchased the domain name vfranklyn.com and set up a remotely hosted website to work with Drupal:

vfranklyn.com

It's just in its initial stages...

I'll probably be migrating this blog over there before too long.

DrupalCamp Websites

I told the Website Team I would gather a list of the websites highlighted at DrupalCamp Colorado. Here they are:

DrupalCamp Websites

Card Sorting and Other Things

The website team met today. We finished renaming links and now will actively start the card sorting process. We're going to go with an online solution and are currently deciding between WebSort and OptimalSort

Meanwhile, I am going to immerse myself in Drupal by installing it on a remotely hosted site and working with it, reading tons of documentation and books, and becoming an active member of the Drupal Community.

Once the card sorting exercises have been finished and I'm pretty confident with Drupal, I will take the results and alter my site map accordingly. Then I will populate a Drupal prototype with the site map and barely populated pages. The public will have access to the prototype and will probably even be able to comment on it.

Then its on to the next phase, Design, Content Population, and Usability Studies...

DrupalCamp Colorado!

I just found out last week through a friend about DrupalCamp Colorado. I signed up just in time and spent this past weekend in Denver learning about Drupal. It was a great experience. Because I'm new to Drupal I felt a bit overwhelmed at times, but mostly I'm excited about what Drupal can do for ppld.org.

I took tons of notes during the sessions and posted them on Google Docs, for anyone who's interested:

• Token Module


• Creating Considerate Web Applications


• Theming Out of the Box


• Drupal Multimedia


• Wisdom of the Crowds


• Introduction to Drupal


• Zen and the Art of Theming


• More Miles, Less Gas

Caveat: I'm a Drupal newbie. I tried to get everything right in the notes, but I probably missed a thing or two. Feel free to comment if you notice any mistakes.

Renaming Links

I'm working with the Website Team to rename links on ppld.org to more user-friendly terms.

After we've come to an agreement on the link names, we'll conduct a small patron card-sorting exercise. After we have analyzed those results, we'll compile the basic organizational structure for the website.

It's slow going, but it is going...