System's blog

Today I upgraded all of the modules to the most recent versions. I've been lax. Sixteen were in need of update. Tomorrow I'll upgrade the Drupal core to the latest version. First I've got to track down where I made changes to the caching headers so I can recreate them. It's annoying, but a necessary evil. And as unfriendly as it is, I think it's a good design choice on Drupal's part.

I like Menalto Gallery, I really do. Apart from Drupal features, it has almost everything I want from a gallery. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with Gallery 2 as Gallery 3 doesn't have the integration API yet. Blech. And the devs don't seem to think that being able to review a picture before it's posted is an important feature. This is a built-in behavior for nodes in Drupal, so its absence is jarring. Add that to what I'd be missing from the gallery being shoehorned into Drupal, and I've reconsidered my decision.

When I first set out on building this site, I'd resolved that I'd go with a native Drupal solution. But I kept running into the same problems: Any given solution had most of the features that I wanted, but was missing a few. The one that came closest to a complete solution was Acidfree, but near as I can tell it's currently unsupported, and the dev release hasn't been updated in over a year.

So I went with Menalto Gallery.

It's really rather amusing what can go wrong with a web site. Spent much of today tracking down a couple of rather obscure issues, one having to do with the Apache Solr PHP client (perils of using beta software) and the other having to do with a misbehaving DNS server. That one's hacked around for now, still down know what caused it.

It seems that quite a few changes have been made in Drupal's theming system. I've got most of the version 5 theme ported to version six, but the code I used to format the taxonomy list is broken. I've tracked down a semi-replacement, but it's not quite what I want. Feh.

Okay, so something unexpected happened. The main module that was holding me back from building the site in Drupal 6 rather than Drupal 5 upgrades. Acidfree now has an updated version. So I've upgraded the site. It went fairly smoothly. The only downside is that the Content Recommendation Engine is still at version 5, although an update is allegedly in the works. I'm willing to wait for it.

APC caching is installed. The difference in performance is barely noticeable, but it's there. It'll make a lot more impact when the site actually has more than one user on it.

Also took the opportunity to do some database cache tuning. Again, I'll have to revisit once there's some traffic load on. But it's good practice.

Yet another minor version update. This one was painless, not even any database updates.

I'm mildly disheartened that Drupal 6 is already in beta and I haven't launched on 5 yet. Although I know it's not that big a deal. When I started on this and 5 was in beta, it took a long time for the modules to catch up. If I switched to 6 now, it would be another year to get to where I am now, and that wouldn't be good.

Upgrade Drupal to version 5.2.

Security updates, plus an update that should make the Chatroom module work.

Finally got out the last of the kinks that were preventing me from using Acidfree and the Links module.

The Links module wasn't building several of the required tables. Still don't' know why. Building them manually makes things work, and now that it's installed it shouldn't' be a problem.

More importantly, I've got mass importing working for Acidfree. Really, the main thing it has going for it over the regular image import is recursiveness. I won't have to import each subdirectory individually. That will be quite spiffy.