It's been a long time since I've posted on here. My life has been a bit topsy-turvy since last Spring. After 7 years of living and breathing Drupal, I hit a wall. Shortly after Drupalcon, I just fizzled out and it wasn't fun anymore. I began investing more and more time into my photography and gave serious thought to pursuing it as a business instead of web development.
If you have come here because of my photography and are wondering if you're in the right place, you are. :) For the last 6 years, this site has been a dumping ground for my writings about Drupal, the web development software I use. I am in the process of getting more "media" into the "Multimedia" and the website will soon be updated to reflect that. In the mean time, you can see some of my photos in my (also in progress) gallery here:
Just wanted to let everyone know that I will be going to DrupalCon. Thanks to everyone who donated. The monies raised covers my flight out there. :)
If anyone wants to get together to chat about Artesian (or anything else), the best way to find me is on IRC. I tend to hop on there whenever I'm in one location for a while.
Nothing terribly exciting to report; I just don't like having the last post on the front page be over a month old because it makes people wonder if I'm still working on it. I'm deliberately not putting this on Planet since it's a lame post. Hopefully no one is subscribed to my RSS directly; if so, I apologize for cluttering your feed.
It's been a month since I said Artesian Forum was almost ready to be committed so I thought I'd write a progress report to explain what's going on.
Update: I didn't get as far as I'd hoped so have it in a sandbox for now while I keep working towards the initial commit to the project page.
Just a small note here since it's 1am. I've passed the really big hurdles I was hitting and the forum is starting to take shape. It's not even remotely close to production ready but I should have something ready to commit tomorrow or Monday, depending on how much time I get to work on it tomorrow.
Michelle
This morning, I checked my queues and found a pointer to a new entity based forum, Brain Forum. I haven't had a chance to test it out, yet, so I'm only going by the description. According to that, it's already functional, and there's plans for future expansion. Basically, bfr beat me to it. My first thought was, "Now what do I do?" I'm sure people are going to ask why I'm bothering with Artesian Forum that's barely started when Brain Forum is already working?
I'm not going to put this out on Planet because it's not a very polished post, just a quick note. Artesian has been delayed way longer than I ever expected for various reasons but I am working on wrapping that stuff up. My intent, at this point, is to really dive into it in December. I've given ETAs before and missed them so no promises, but that's my current plan.
Imagine you are a painter, by hobby, not by trade, painting for the love of painting. After spending many hours creating paintings and giving them away, you reach a point where the requests have slowed and you can relax a bit without the pressure of people clamoring for more. And then an opportunity presents itself to you to paint a mural on the side of a building.
Disclaimer: In case some future employer / potential client runs across this on the interwebs some day, please keep in mind that my reckless attitude here is due to this being my site and a site that's not of much importance outside occasional Drupal ramblings. I certainly take much more care when handling sites that aren't mine or that can't handle being down for days while I work my way out of whatever mess I've made.
If you don't frequent the webmaster's issue queue on drupal.org you likely aren't aware of the debate that has been going on over the guidelines for Planet Drupal. If you are reading this post, you are most likely a reader of the Planet feed and this issue concerns you. So hop on over to drupal.org and join in the discussion.
Starting with the 2.x branch, Advanced Forum supports the Nodecomment module (branch 2.x of that as well). Using Nodecomment is and will remain optional but using it makes available many more options by making all forum posts, whether they start the topic or reply to it, equal.
I've always loved the default MyBB theme. Personally, I think it looks much better than PHPBB's default theme. Since MyBB is GPL, I've often thought about porting it over for use with Advanced Forum 2.x. Last night, I spent a couple hours and got pretty far. It still has some rough edges but it's not bad. I can't really spend any more time on it right now so I decided to put what I have up here in my blog both to show what I have so far and share it in case someone wants to finish it off.
This is a quick and dirty tutorial for calling a CTools/Panels 3 custom handler from code. It works for handlers for the system pages, such as the user page override. Calling custom/panels pages from code is different. Make sure you replace all instances of MODULE_NAME with your module's name.
Step 1: Create a file named MODULE_NAME.delegator_default.inc and put it somewhere in your module's directory.
Step 2: Paste in the following code.
Note: The CTools / Panels UI has changed drastically since this article was written, so much of it doesn't apply anymore.
This article is for folks used to making Panels pages in Panels 2 feeling bewildered by Panels 3. I wrote it quickly while my son had lunch and it's not polished at all but it may help some folks until there are better docs. I'm assuming you have bleeding edge Panels 3 and CTools installed for this.
Update: Feb 17, 2010 This article was written nearly a year ago when CTools was still in alpha. I don't know how much of it applies anymore but I've been told there's an up to date plugin example that ships with CTools now so you'll want to look to that as an example.
Note: This article requires the current Panels 3 / CTools development snapshots (or the beta when it comes out) as the alphas do not contain the recent changes to content types.
Early this morning, just past midnight my time, I put out 1.0 releases of Advanced Forum, Advanced Profile Kit, and Author Pane in both D5 and D6 with the exception of APK D6 which still needs a lot of work. I was trying for a 4/1 release just for fun but they're showing up as 3/31 for me (though one person reported it says 4/1 for them). If you've been using the RCs, there's not much change.
Earlier today, someone created an account just to attack me. I was in the lobby of the YMCA when it was pointed out to me on IRC. For a while I was in shock, fighting back the tears so I didn't look silly crying there in public about something on the computer. I've been having a rough time with Drupal lately, feeling overwhelmed by all the people looking to me for help, not getting paid for a big chunk of my very limited freelancing, frustrations with trying to get my main site to Drupal 6.
It has been a long and twisty road since I first set out to build a community site for the greater La Crosse, Wisconsin area (also known as the Coulee Region) over two years ago. And it's a road that I continue to travel. Coulee Region ONLINE, as I call my site, has been running (or maybe limping) for most of those two years on Drupal 5 but is in a constant state of undone filled with glitches and promises of good things to come Real Soon Now.
[Note: The project that was supposed to fund some of this collapsed which means everything is going to take longer. I'm still working on the modules and will get to 1.0 soon as I'm able but I'm doing this for free so it's not top priority anymore. I'm hoping to have 1.0 of everything except possibly APK for D6 out in February. APK D6 depends on exactly how much I decide to put in the 1.0.]
