drupal

I accidentally hosed a post last night. I was trying to delete an attachment to a post but instead deleted the entire post. Luckily I have nightly backups, so restore was quick and easy. It was the first time in a LONG time that I've had to restore the database, but I am extremely relieved that my backup system is working perfectly. I also rsync the backups to my home computer they are stored in two different places.,

The state of Drupal audio files support in Drupal is a mess right now. The audio module, which is great by the way, has not been fully updated to 6.x. This effort has probably been hampered somewhat by the fact that "audio nodes" is not the way that most drupalers want to treat audio going forward.

This script will automatically update a drupal module if your drupal source code is stored in a Subversion respository. It first removes all files except for the .svn directories, then extracts the tarball for the new version of the module. Then it runs an svn status command to see which files are new, which files have been removed in the new version, and which files have changed. The difference between this and svn_load_dirs is that renames aren't handled (well svn_load_dirs doesn't really handle them very well either).

Looks like I have finally banished spam from this site forever thanks to the Drupal CAPTCHA module. Apparently this captcha is not readable by software yet, or maybe no one has tried. There are so many sites out there without any captcha or spam filters that the spammers probably don't even need to resort to captcha-deciphering. I almost don't even need the Akismet module anymore.

Finally got rid of spam from my site. It had caused me problems to no end. I have been using Akismet, but it is not perfect and has the odd false positive so I can't have it delete messages it thinks are spam. I have to have it put them in a spam moderation queue. But unfortunately I have to scan through them quickly before deleting which takes some time. When I was on holidays in May the spam actually caused my disk space on the server to run out.

What a pleasant surprise to find that my patch for geocoding of Canadian addresses for the location module was committed to CVS only a couple days after being submitted. So now geocoding for Canadian addresses works with the new location and gmap modules in Drupal 5.x. bdragon, the maintainer of the gmap module also threw in geocoding of Canadian addresses using Google as well.

I just upgraded to Drupal 5. Seemed to go fairly smoothly except for a few glitches involving the location module. What a PITA is was though. I took my old site's mysql database dump, copied into a local Drupal 4 installation, disabled all modules, dumped the database, copied it to a local Drupal 5 installation with all my modules installed, then started enabling modules 1-4-ish at a time, and running update.php after each, making sure that the schema upgrades worked properly.

A while back I created a recently updated drupal modules feed. I used RSSxL. This sucked wind because it would only scan the first 20kB of the page it was scrapping so it would miss tons of drupal module updates. I recently tried Dapper and was really impressed.

I got pissed off at that crappy old sands_css theme I was using. I realized it wasn't working in Konqueror properly (and therefore probably screwed up in Safari as well). Anyways I always thought it looked kind of ugly so I just switched quickly to some random theme I found in 5 minutes on Drupal's theme page. It's a lot nicer and it has 3 columns so all those widgets in the sidebar are now all closer to the top of the page.

A while ago I mentioned that I was waiting for a few modules to be ported to Drupal 5.x before I upgrade this site to Drupal 5.0. Well the final two modules, gmap and location were ported recently and I started creating a Drupal 5.0 installation in my subversion repository and starting testing. Everything has gone smoothly so far, including many schema upgrades by the various modules.

I just upgraded to Drupal 4.7.5 today and upgrading is now more of a snap than ever for me. I fully track the drupal sources in my own svn server and then I merge changes between the releases into my own Drupal 4.7 branch (that contains core drupal + patches + contrib modules + contrib themes + 4 sites/ directories). It is so easy. Here is an article I wrote that explains how to maintain vendor sources using Drupal specifically.

I am really looking forward to upgrading this site to Drupal 5.0. I really like the new default theme and I am thinking of using it along with a customized colour scheme. I am a big fan of using default themes by the way because it means I never have to monkey around with my theme if anything in the underlying API changes from version-to-version. For a simple site like mine, using a default theme makes the most sense. Especially for someone who is by no means an expert in HTML and CSS.

I just created a feed of recently updated drupal modules using RSSxl Beta could do it. I entered:

• Page URL: http://drupal.org/project/Modules/date
• Start String: leave blank
• Start Item String: <h2>
• End Item String: </div>
• Start Description String: <p>
• End Description String: </p>
• Link Number: 1

Unfortunately, according to this forum post,

So I go away for the Thanksgiving weekend and come home to find out my site has been hacked. The attack consisted of setting up some elaborate phishing attacks for multiple Canadian and US banks. The main damage was done at a site that I maintain for some friends of mine, namely, Will Stroet's site. It is in a subdirectory of this site, set up with a domain pointer. I had ftp access enabled to the willmusic.ca directory ONLY and so I had assumed that the attackers had come in that way, through FTP. Then I noticed 3 files in my drupal modules/month directory. That got be really worried that there is some sort of security hole in Drupal or that my SSH credentials had been compromised in some way, because there is no FTP access to that directory (or at least there shouldn't be).

Ok, after adding the captcha module I still got one comment spam in a very short amount of time, so I found that there is an Akismet module for Drupal, although it isn't listed on the Drupal module list. It is truly amazing and works wonders.