[d] enclosed in brackets chaotic perfectionist for hire

On our company Intranet, we have a list of employees with various bits of information (name, contact info, etc). The problem with it is that I had to do all the updates, since it was all flat file and we didn't really have anyone else to manage the HTML. Once we got someone else to help out, it was easier... but still a pain to update flat files.

I'm pushing for another option (which I won't talk about yet, but is known to a couple of people on the outside), but until that happens, we needed something a little easier to update. Since we have an application server, I went with PHP/MySQL to get it done. There may be (and are) other options, but I've done some PHP before, and used something like this a few years ago (code reuse is nice).

Now that it's available to us internally, I was wondering if anyone could recommend a system to manage something like this. When we move to the next iteration of our Intranet, we might keep this going if it works well enough.

The ideas that I write about seem to come in waves. It's not like I have something to post every day, but sometimes there will be several things I want to write about in a whosrt period of time, then nothing for a while - just look at my posting dates to get an idea of this.

While writing last week, I thought it would be good if Drupal had the ability to write something up and save it as a draft (saved, but not published). It was brought to my attention again while writing my this post when Firefox (3b3) crashed and I lost what I had written. Blech. There have been discussions on the Drupal site for a while, but nothing that was "in place" for it. Then I found this site, which suggested I use the Views module (which I have and am still learning about). Why didn't I think of that earlier?

The Views module allows you to create different content pages (among other options) with a defined set of nodes on it. In the case of creating Drafts, I set it up to show any nodes (postings) that aren't marked as Published. Now, instead of worrying that I'm not going to be able to recover in case of a Firefox crash (or anything else), I can save an unpublished version of what I'm working on and finish it later. It also works as a kind of "Save as..." in the meantime.

Sure, other CMSs out there already do that, but we'll get there.

It is done.

I did the upgrade from Drupal 4.7 to v5.3 yesterday, and finished up some of it this morning. It went smoother than I thought it would, and I have to say it a definite improvement. On the administration side, the admin pages seem to be cleaner and easier to navigate, as well as being more helpful. Cheers to Drupal for making the process as easy as it is.

To be sure it went well, I actually remembered to RTFM on upgrading. All of the old files were removed, and the new ones put in their place. This was especially important for the modules, most of which would've been broken. If anything, the site seems to be working better.

Next step: re-doing the look of the site. I'm using a theme called NewsFlash from RoopleTheme (in green, of course). Once I get PHPTemplate down a bit more I should be able to put something decent together.

...for a little while, anyway.

The move to 4.7 went on with no problem, especially since there weren't a lot of changes between that and 4.6 (which is what I started with). The change to 5.x scares me a little. It's not that I think it will be bad by any means, I'm just not sure where to start in making sure that all of my themes and modules are ready.

I've already started looking at my theme (which is more or less the least of the problems I might run into). I just hope all my modules work when all is said and done. This is going to be a big change, and it might as well be done now.

Yes, the one bonus of almost no readers...

i seem to be a little behind.

Since I set up Drupal on this site, I've been running 4.6.x - which is now more than a little out of date. Hmm... maybe I should do this post after, in case there's some crazy exploit that I have wide open.

The plan:

• Upgrade to 4.7.7 [done, and went well], then
• Upgrade to 5.2, then
• Hope that everything is working correctly.

Has anyone else done a Drupal upgrade, especially recently?

If you see (or saw) the maintenance page for a little while, that would be the reason... One of the minor benefits of having a low-traffic site is that I don't have to worry about too much of an interruption if I upgrade during "normal" hours.