Learning more about Drupal 6

| drupal

It’s another slow work day, so I invested some time in learning about Drupal 6. Now that I’m familiar with Drupal’s structure, I’m tempted to move my blog to it. The wordpress_import module successfully imported my existing blog posts and comments. In order to make it work, I needed to delete all the spam comments and increase my PHP execution limits to 4 minutes and 256 MB RAM.

I remember how I migrated all of my posts from Emacs Planner into WordPress by generating and slurping in the RSS feed. I’m using a similar process now using WordPress’ XML Export format. I don’t even need to break it into smaller RSS feeds for memory usage.

I’m currently prototyping things through Drupal’s web-based interface. It’s easier to explore, but it also makes me slightly nervous because my changes haven’t been checked into my git repository. I use a custom module instead of making types through CCK, though, as I find it easier to hack PHP than figure that out. ;)

So what is it like now?

Screenshot of Drupal site

The key piece I’m working on is a way to keep track of recent and upcoming presentations, conferences, and other events. I’d like to eventually tie that into a content management system that will make it easy for me to plan future talks, too. I wonder if I can use this to learn about Twitter and Facebook integration as well… =)

We’re still on Drupal 5 at work, but it’s fun experimenting with Drupal 6 and wrapping my mind around the differences. I’m looking forward to learning more about tasks in installation profiles, theming, and other good things.

Always learning!

You can comment with Disqus or you can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.