apocryph.org Notes to my future self

Flash of insight: Why am I still using drupal?

After outsourcing comment processing to Disqus due to the lack of the Akismet module, fighting a buggy alpha version of the Views module for Drupal 6.0 to implement a front page that doesn’t use those damn teasers, and installing yet another security update using an update process that can best be described as a pain in the ass, I’ve finally asked myself why I use Drupal for what is basically textbook blogging.

The answer? Well, once upon a time, back in 2005, I had an HTML site that I’d painstakingly built, and I shopped around content management systems trying to find one flexible enough to let me reconstruct that look and feel in a theme. I looked far and wide, at WordPress, DotNetNuke, PHPNuke, MovableType, and just about every other CMS and blogging platform one can imagine. The only one with the flexibility I thought I needed was Drupal. I spent days getting my head around it’s ridiculously expansive surface area, cooked up a theme, and that was that.

Problem is, Drupal 6.0 is out and it feels like a step back. None of the modules I need work, and the system is unimaginably complicated, which is probably why lots of high-profile sites with unique requirements use it. However, apocryph.org is neither high profile nor possessing of unique requirements, and I’m now willing to accept a site redesign if it means I can use a blogging platform that Just Works.

Which brings me to the next problem: how in the hell am I going to get years of posts out of Drupal and into something else? Obviously the answer will involve me writing data migration code, which sucks and makes it less likely I’ll get around to it.

Still, I’m getting really tired of slogging through the Drupal mud.

Upgraded apocryph.org to Drupal 6

Today I took the plunge and upgraded apocryph.org to the latest version of the Drupal content management system. Drupal 6 has been in the works for what seems an eternity, and has a number of big improvements which made it hard to resist. Unfortunately, I now somewhat regret the decision, as there were considerable gotchas to cope with.

Of course, I started out with a complete backup of my Drupal 5.x site and database, just in case. I went through the upgrade steps in UPGRADE.txt, but despite being logged in to the site as the root user, I had to bypass security checks by adding the $update_free_access = TRUE; line in sites/default/settings.php. The upgrade itself went fine, but as another consequence of Drupal seemingly ‘forgetting’ I was logged in as superuser, after the upgrade the site was still in maintenance mode, and I couldn’t log in to change it!

Fortunately this post got me out of that particular jam, but it was still a gotcha that was definitely not present the last time I did a Drupal upgrade.

The next gotcha was one I’d anticipated: Due to major changes improvements to the theming system, my custom Drupal theme that implements the distinctive apocryph.org look and feel sucks hard under Drupal 6. I had to compare it to one of the themes that ships with Drupal 6 to figure out what was wrong. The big thing was that themes now need a themename.info file that contains some metadata for the theme. Since my theme uses custom regions, I also had to declare the regions in the .info file. Apart from that it was things like $language being an object instead of a string, and similar stuff. The Converting 5.x Themes to 6.x page helped alot, as did the writing .info files for themes page.

Once the theme was working, I set out to install the 6.0 versions of the various modules I use to run apocryph.org. Here I was in for an unpleasant surprise. The following modules were used in Drupal 5.x, and are not (yet, anyway) ported to Drupal 6:

• akismet
• commentrss
• gsitemap
• subscriptions
• taxonomy_access
• views

Since akismet and commentrss aren’t available, I’ve had to disable anonymous comments to avoid a deluge of comment spam. Without gsitemap Google has to crawl my site the old fashioned way and won’t pick up the structure of the site. The other modules I can live without.

Once I was resigned to the limitations imposed by the missing modules, I pulled up the site as an anonymous user to make sure it looked ok. Imagine my surprise to find that the site was blank! When viewed as an authenticated user all my content from the last two years was there, but to an anonymous user, the site looked empty. I tried pasting in the URLs to some of my blog posts into the anonymous browser window, but they all came back “access denied”. The Drupal log reported the access denied errors, but didn’t offer a clue as to what caused them.

I suspected this had to do with the fact that I ran Drupal 5.x with the taxonomy_access module, which let me specify access control rules for different vocabularies. Since this wasn’t in 6.0, I thought maybe the taxonomy_access module might’ve left some cruft in the Drupal database that was messing up the access control rules.

I did a little poking around, and ran into this support request for taxonomy_access. It turns out you have to go to Administer | Content Management | Post settings and click the Rebuild Permissions button to clear out access control cruft left over by taxonomy_access. Once I did that, all was well.

I hope the modules I need get ported to Drupal 6 soon, so I can reopen anonymous comments. In the mean time, I’ll try to convince myself all the spiffy new Drupal 6 features were worth the hassle.

UPDATE: I also had trouble with the pathauto module. The configuration left over from Drupal 5.x used token names like [user] and [title], but the new 6.x version of pathauto issues errors strongly urging you to use [user-raw] and [title-raw] instead. What’s more, it was configured to use the underscore (_) as a separator character in the generated paths, but was also defaulting to removing underscores from path names. I don’t know how it got that way since I wouldn’t have set that up in Drupal 5.x, but I changed it to leave underscores in place.

Test post

I just upgraded apocryph.org to Drupal 6, and it’s not going so well. This is a test post; I’ll post a detailed AAR later.

Something amiss w/ Drupal content

There seems to be something screwed up w/ Drupal atm. Only my last blog post shows up on the front page or when listing my blog posts, but all the others are still on the site, and reachable by their respective URLs. I’m investigating now; nothing’s changed, that I know of.

UPDATE: I’m an idiot. My mall ninja post was being chopped off at an unfortunate spot to form the teaser, and the resulting markup had all subsequent article links rendering improperly (that is to say, not at all!).