The Modular Company (TMC)

I think that wherever there is a large enough monoculture of some sort there will be an automatic attraction for spammers and other miscreants to peddle their wares.

The rationale behind this is that as soon as the cost of reaching people goes down the incentive for a spammer to abuse the system will go up. So any kind of place that allows a uniform way to reach a large number of users through automated forms submission, search engine spamming or protocols (such as email) that spam is inevitable.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.