The Modular Company (TMC)

Revision moderation is nice but it does nothing about newly created content, so you end up with two queues for moderation, one for existing content that gets edited and another one for new materials.

This is hardly ideal and very confusing to users. To remedy that I've tried to make a hybrid moderation module that takes elements from modr8 and revision_moderation.

I thought it was going to take me a week, but in the end it only took a day to get a rough version that already handles most of the work.

Today I spent a lot of time trying to embed Flash games in the different gamesites and also tried different theme's.
There are two type of embed options which affiliates offer: a RSS/XML feed like Zylom offers which works perfect (see www.gamescollection.com) but others provide a piece of script including the .swf file. I have tried to upload the file on the same spot as where the embed code is submitted and changed the destination URL into play42.com/files/*.swf where the files are staged if you upload a file.

Unfortunately didn't get it working yet. I'll get into this later on.

Today I did a lot of housekeeping stuff that I'd been putting of for a long time (moving to the living room because it is just too bloody cold in the room that I used to work in so far, this house is from 1903 and it has only one little heater, hopefully I'll have that remedied somewhere in the middle of the next year).

After a couple of days of banging my head against the concrete I finally found a way to get the city galleries to work the way I want them to.

Slowly we're making progress, the feeling is good and we've decided to go 'live' with the drupal based corporate site. So, http://themodularcompany.com/ is now the official homepage.

Catchall (our not-yet-developed domain parking lot) has been moved completely over to drupal now and Joyce has done some really neat stuff with it for http://softwaremagazines.com/, and in the next couple of weeks she will work on getting more of the domains developed.

After a week of looking at drupal and lots of conversations the consensus seems to be that drupal is very impressive but extremely large, and that it seems to be more geared towards building sites from the ground up than porting existing sites and structures into it.

Statistics are now working, but it still takes a bit of fiddling to get it right. You have to manually add the stats entry to every template where you want stats tracking, there is no 'add this to all templates' option.

To get the stats to work required a custom made module. The other alternative would have been to manually add the stats tag code to all the templates but I thought that would have been a pretty ugly modification.

After fiddling all day yesterday to get the first site ported to the new system I rigged up a little script that does a basic configuration and then makes a bunch of modifications, adds the right users and sets up all kinds of access permissions. That way adding a new domain is a matter of seconds.

Also I've added the google ads to the skeleton so it automatically displays advertising in the top link bar and on the left hand side.

So, after talking with Joyce today we decided to port catchall (static sites) to drupal. This is going to be quite a bit of work but it's a good start because these are our simplest sites.

User subdomains are a common thing on the net, users have come to expect it and will blindly type username.domain.com to get to their site. It's up to the provider of the service to make sure it works. In drupal this functionality is not present right from the start, but it is fairly easy to add it in such a way that no core file modifications are required.