The Modular Company (TMC)

Today i added some content to diyfiles.com in total 6 new diy projects
The new projects are toys, home and garden and transportation.
New ideas and content are welcome.

After a long long (very long!) phonecall with Joyce yesterday where I tried to put my frustrations about the drupal way into words today I decided to take a different approach.

I'm so concerned with the performance of the smaller sites because any one of them has the potential to grow that I am afraid that if one of them does take off that we'd have to rebuild the whole thing without drupal in order to be able to achieve adequate performance. Clearly that would suck :)

The "p2p Bee" lists companies, projects and initiatives related to peer-to-peer technologies.

There are lots of days when I'm happy with drupal, but today was not one of them.

The last couple of days have been an uphill battle to get the data from the old autotagger databases imported into drupal so that users can edit the city records.

I've spent a day or two to move all the countries under the right continent and to clean up all the accents and such, now the time of bulk import has arrived.

Today I have created an other interface for TMC. Shuffled with the links as you may have noticed, but I am pleased now with this layout/setup.

I have used themes/garland which gives the option to also change the color-setting of the website. Instead of using the primary navigation (which is not very visible) I have moved the items to the main navigation. User login box is moved to the righthandside and there is one item left which I'd like to realise: put all admin links also to the righthandside so we don't have to search for these links when the site is a bit bigger.

This time to the 'node relativity' module.

The module did not include an option to allow you to list all the parent nodes as a path for pathauto.

In my case, I have a countries, regions and cities table. The format for a city url is:

/geoinfo/countryname/regionname/cityname.html

That really needs walking recursively back up the chain of parent nodes to figure out the url for the city page, based on the title of the parent alone you wouldn't get further than region.

If you would like to add the search functionalitiy you need to do the following:

- login as administrator
- go to administer
- go to user management
- find the search option and select the permission to search for anonymous user etc.

Before the search gives results you need to index the website, to do so go to:
- administer
- site configuration
- search settings

Note that the search requires cron to be set up correctly.

Today I found out about the 'node relativity' module that allows you to link nodes in parent/child/sibling relationships.

Views is fairly easily modified to select on a parent/child relationship and I've used that to get rid of the custom php block that I wrote before to make the display of the images that go with a city.

Now I'm still left with a bunch of ugly links from the node relativity module that I'll have to get rid of.

Images are probably the most frustrating element of working with drupal. Nothing is easy or as you expect it, it's that simple. There are lots of different ways of doing things but none of them are complete enough that you can stay away from custom coding if you want anything beyond the very basics.

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.