This morning I switched my website from PHP Nuke to Drupal.

Most work in the migration was writing a script to transfer the articles, specials, book reviews and comments from one database format to another. The script converted 121 users, 1693 stories, 42 book reviews, 30 topics, 65 specials and 1999 comments.

Now there is a lot of tweaking to be done over the next couple weeks. It's great fun to get to know Drupal, and I'm really happy with my choice.

After a long, long day the migration is as good as ready. Tomorrow morning I only need to switch the settings in my Apache server, copy some pictures to their new location and the new site will take the old site's place.

Feel free to take a look:

http://test.guusbosman.nl

Here are the things I need to do before switching this site to Drupal:

1. Fix bug in ordering comments (reuse code from system update 172)
2. Migrate subtitles of Specials
3. Add log message and use correct creation date in node_revision for story & page
4. Migrate hostname of anonymous comments
5. Migrate private attribute of stories
6. Configure RSS feeds. Strictly speaking this can wait till after the migration but I want to be sure I know what's involved.
7. Set the creation time of book reviews
8. Filter out "Re:" in comment titles
9. Filter out in stories

Last week уе have been testing with the trial version of the new site. Jaap, Jean-Paul, Jerry, Mieke and Rob have found a couple of problems and suggestions for improvements.

Here's is what they found:

1. Bug: the Recent Comment block doesn't show an author.
2. Bug: The order of the comments looks strange. "I don't get the order of the comments. As I watch this news item, the comments don't look ordered by date. Do they? Should they?".
3. Feature request: Use a default image for users that don't have an image & anonymous users.
4. Feature request: perhaps it's useful to be able to delete your own comments.
5. Bug: The signature (for comments) doesn't really work nice: you always have to "move it aside" before you can start typing a comment. The cursor isn't placed on a useful place.
6. Feature request: It would be nice if the signature is visually separated from the comment by a line or something.
7. Bug: Preview doesn't show HTML code.

Here are my findings for these items:

1. Fixed with the comments module patch.
2. The script I used to transfer comments from the old to the new website had a bug and this caused newly created comments in the new site to appear out-of-order. This will be fixed before the migration.
3. I like this idea, and I'll probably implement it. Can wait till after the migration.
4. I can see this being useful. I'll have to get to know the comments module of Drupal a bit better. Can wait till after the migration.
5. This was pretty annoying. I've downloaded an optional module that fixes this and made signatures in general much nicer. Fixed.
6. Included in (5). Fixed.
7. I couldn't really reproduce this one. However, I noticed that the &ltb> and &lti> tags were not allowed in the HTML filter which may have caused the confusion. I'll make sure to add these again to the filter right after the migration.

While working on adding the author name to the Recent Comments block I saw a lot of feature requests on Drupal.org to make the amount of comments that is displayed in the block configurable.



Since I was working on that code anyway I created a second patch to allow the administrator to set the amount of comments shown.

Download the patch for Drupal 5.1 to make the number of comments configurable for the recent comments block.

Installation

To install this patch download the text file and save it as 51comments2.patch on your server. This patch has been tested with Drupal 5.1.

cd /var/www/htdocs/(yoursite)
cd drupal
patch modules/comment/comment.module 51comments2.patch                     

The result will look like this:

Hmm...  Looks like a unified diff to me...
The text leading up to this was:
--------------------------
|--- /home/guus/drupal-5.1/modules/comment/comment.module       Mon Jan 29 22:51:53 2007
|+++ comment.module     Sat Mar  3 03:15:59 2007
--------------------------
Patching file comment.module using Plan A...
Hunk #1 succeeded at 240.
Hunk #2 succeeded at 504.
Hunk #3 succeeded at 1892.
done

I've started testing a new version of this website. One of the testers commented on the Recent Comments block.


Unlike the current site's Recent Comments block (for PHP Nuke), the new site didn't display the author of each comment in the list with recent comments. I didn't like that either so I fixed it.

Tonight I've also made this change available to other users of Drupal with a patch. The source code of Drupal is much, much nicer than the PHP Nuke's code and I'm glad I'm finally making the move to a modern system.

Download the patch for Drupal 5.1 to add comment author names to the recent comments block.

Examples:

Option 1: no comment authors (default).

Option 2: with comment authors.

Installation

To install this patch download the text file and save it as 51comments.patch on your server. This patch has been tested with Drupal 5.1.

cd /var/www/htdocs/(yoursite)
cd drupal
patch modules/comment/comment.module 51comments.patch                     

Result will look like:

Hmm...  Looks like a unified diff to me...
The text leading up to this was:
--------------------------
|--- /home/guus/drupal-5.1/modules/comment/comment.module       Mon Jan 29 22:51:53 2007
|+++ /var/www/htdocs/testguusbosmannl/modules/comment/comment.module    Fri Mar  2 20:59:19 2007
--------------------------
Patching file modules/comment/comment.module using Plan A...
Hunk #1 succeeded at 51.
Hunk #2 succeeded at 252.
Hunk #3 succeeded at 270.
Hunk #4 succeeded at 292.
Hunk #5 succeeded at 520.
Hunk #6 succeeded at 1908.
done

It's March 1st: Baba Marta in Bulgaria.

Nadia sent us martenitsi so I am wearing one today.

Chestita Baba Marta everybody!

It's been quiet on my website for a week, but back stage a lot of things are happening.

I'm working on a new version of the website using Drupal and I've spent last weekend and some evenings working on conversion scripts. Obviously I want to make sure all articles, comments etc are transferred completely, which takes a lot of time.

No promises yet (this has been a long running project) but I'm getting ready to make the switch and start using the new site.

Four years ago we watched a new show on Dutch TV: Idols.

A few weeks ago the show started its 6th season in the States. It's called American Idol here and it's great fun to watch.


With Time Warner Cable's built-in recording function we can watch the show whenever we want without commercials and tonight we saw yesterday's show where the 12 female contestants performed.

With a much larger group of potential contestants than in the Netherlands the level of the candidates here is high. Most candidates are pretty good, especially in these last 24 (with some notable exceptions).

There was one exceptionally good performance: LaKisha Jones.

Here's a video clip of yesterday's show with LaKisha:

Update 2/25: Used a different video (old one stopped working).

Today is Sasha's birthday!

In Bulgaria and the Netherlands that is -- in the U.S. she still needs to wait a few hours before the big day.

Happy Birthday!