nodalpoint.org

Nodalpoint DNA: Nodalpoint's DNA ?
Update: Switchover is done. Please leave comments if you notice anything amiss. Note, Drupal 5.1 includes free tagging, so when posting, look for the 'nodalpoint tags' vocabulary. Awfully blue this theme :)

Update 2: Spam filtering is now in place, so no more comment spam, archives are back, search is still broken and reoranization of the blogroll is now underway. Read more for the details.

Update 3: Search is now working, spam filtering has turned away the most recent spam comments and everything else looks good. I'm considering this a successful upgrade.

After installing Drupal's image module and img_assist, which provides in-line image support in posts, I kept getting blank admin pages returned. The problem is documented here. It turns out that the default maximum memory allowed per page load for PHP is 8MB, with addition of more modules to a default Drupal install the memory usage goes up and the result is blank pages. After increasing the page memory, I was able to install and configure image, img_assist, and the spam module. The spam module filters all content submitted to the site and also limits the number or URLs per coment and post. Hopefully the spammers will go away now.

To add images to a posts, look for the photo icon under the textareas. After clicking on the icon, you can upload an image to be included in the post. Plenty of images are available from Flikr, via their Creative Commons Search feature. If you use those, just be mindful of the licenses. Correct attributions can be included using the description field in the upload form, see this post for an example.

Archives are back. Between Drupal 4.x and 5.1 some of the previously core modules were move to contributed modules, these included the moderation queue and the archives module. These are both installed and working. I'm still working on fixing search, and improved user profiles.

I have made a start on reorganizing the blogroll wikipage in preparation for a vote chris suggested. I'll do a separate post on this so it doesn't get lost in the comments.

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So if the endless comment spam hasn't turned you off, you'll be please to know that I am almost finished upgrading the site to Drupal 5.1. In order to start the upgrade process I will shortly be turning off posting and commenting permissions for everyone so I can take a snapshot of the database for upgrading. It should take about one hour to run through the upgrade process, so I expect some time after that I'll take the old site off line and then upload the new site. Read on for a few more upgrade details.

At the moment I have a tentative offer of hosting, and for that to happen, I need to have a stable upgrade running. The site database is completely crufty, but the automated upgrade script in Drupal seems to work. I'm currently tweaking the default install, I'm only going to run the default theme with a few slight modifications. Content moderation is no longer in the core, so I've installed modr8, which is nicer than the old core module anyway. Other than that, I've only reinstalled pathauto and the comment rss module. I might add image upload and posting features if people see them being useful. Alternatively to improve picture formatting, I can add some extra CSS to the default template ?

I do have a nodalpoint theme under development but as tends to be the case with graphic design and me, it is taking forever. And the reason this happening now is due to Chinese New Year, so happy year of the pig!