Drupal

I came within minutes of deleting Drupal and starting all over with Wordpress 2.5. Drupal is a more robust package than Wordpress, but there is so much involved with attaining the right look and feel that it is at times a chore. Wordpress has a lot of the functionality that Drupal needs right out of the box, so it saves you from installing and configuring fifty-billion different modules to make it all work.

If you have visited the site before, you will possibly have noticed the different header and some typographic changes. I added a bit of extra line spacing to the CSS to accommodate the larger titles. I also swapped the dark blue for black as I was finding it hard on my eyes.

The upside for Drupal is that you have a lot more control over the layout of your site. The blocks system really makes a difference. It is fiddly and it is involved but I am going to stick with it. I might even upgrade to Drupal 6.2 if I get my webserver running.

Next step: Clean up the damned ads and get the Amazon shop configured a little better. I might even add a shop page.

Well it looks like I managed to sort out the automatic URL creation. It is a little bit fiddly, but I think I have gotten the hang of it. I am fairly sure that there will be a little bit of tweaking that needs to be done to fix up some redirect issues within the site. But basically, it appears that Pathauto has done the job with minimal configuration. It only has one dependency, the "tokens" module. You can get them both from Drupal:

Pathauto Module

Token Module

Just set them up and play around with the settings. I set my blog titles path as: [yyyy]-[mm]-[dd]-[title-raw]

Here is something annoying that happened to me of late.  I was messing around with a template file trying to validate a feed for a particular newsreader.  All seemed to be going well until I made a blog post.  I wrote the post, clicked submit and then... WHITE SCREEN.  This was some time after I had made the modification so I failed to see the connection.

Everything worked as it was supposed to except for the post submit screen.  Never one to let things sit broken for two long, I went hunting for the source of my problem.  As it turns out, invalid characters including spaces where they shouldn't be are the frequent cause of Drupal white screens.  I checked my template file and sure enough I had some.  Once they were removed, everything worked as it was supposed to.

If you are having problems with white screens, check your template file located in the folder of the theme that you are using.  It just might have been corrupted somewhere along the line.

Source: ContractWebDevelopment

I was having tremendous problems with absolute and relative domain URLs on my site. It is is an enormous problem for RSS feeds. If your images are showing up on your site then you are probably having the same problem I was. There is an easy solution, however, that solution has been incredibly difficult to find. As with most Drupal troubleshooting issues, you have to search through pages and pages and then you have to hunt through the page that it is covered on in order to find a solution. It is very frustrating, so I figured that I would document the process and save everyone the trouble.

How to Switch TinyMCE from Relative URLS to Absolute URLs

You are going to need to edit a little code here. It can be done so from notepad if you need to, but if you have Dreamweaver, that is the program for it.

Just in case anyone out there is having the same problem that I am!  Drupal is a great blogging platform and CMS; the trouble is that there are lots of clashes with third party software that can make getting a site up and running a real chore.  The latest problem I have encountered was with the Image_Assist module.  Image_Assist makes uploading a file into your blog content really easy.  The trouble is that it does not save files so that they are compatible with RSS.  If you test out your RSS feed, you will find that it is missing any images.  This has the potential to really cut down on your site traffic.  Anyway, to cut a long story short, I scoured the WWW and came across this patch.  If you are unable to get your images pumping into your feed, check out the patch and the explanation.

Image_Assist Absolute URL Patch