General discussion

anyone has made Favorite Nodes working for 4.6? thanks.

I hope what I post is not considered bashing Drupal or the community at large, because IMO both are top notch. Just providing some feedback that I hope helps the project in the long term.

Okay, I installed and played around with Drupal a few days ago. At the same time I also installed the latest version of Joomla, as I wanted to compare and contrast the two packages. Keep in mind that while I have a technical background (programming) I had no prior experience with CMS in general. And going in I was more inclined to pick Drupal, as I read much about Drupal's cleaner code and better structure.

I was able to get Drupal installed without any trouble, and found it no more difficult to install than Joomla. In fact, I sort of got hungup on Joomla initially, so Drupal was actually faster to install. But the real difference is what came next.

With Drupal, I played around with it for hours, without really making significant progress in doing "something". The terminology was confusing, and I was not confident where to go in many cases to perform a certain function. The documentation that I read on this site was in many cases not helpful to me. There were so many documents on a variety of topics available, but I just didn't seem to be able to break through the initial fog of "getting" how the application worked. After about 4 hours of playing around, I decided to give Joomla a try.

I just learnt the hard way, never use the same name for a theme and a module.

My hook_block() was being called as theme_block()! X-0

This is a heads up to everyone doing 4.7 upgrades. Yesterday, I updated kairosnews.org to the most recent Drupal 4.7 RC. The upgrade itself went fine, but within just a couple of hours of switching the site from maintenance mode to public access, spammers began autoregistering on the site and creating user accounts with links to sites in their profiles.

I have tried out several desktop clients with the Drupal blogapi. I have narrowed it down to a few, including Blogjet, Rocketpost, and WB Editor 2. Blogjet seems to be the most stable.

Questions:

1. Are there any other good clients I should try? (tried ecto, latest beta version for windows doesn't seem stable, not sure earlier versions have desired functionality, tried qumana, odd interface, locked up trying to post, lost post.)

2. Does anyone know of a combination of client and Drupal blogapi protocol that will allow both images to be inserted/uploaded without FTP, and and supports tagging posts with taxonomy categories? I settled on the MetaWeblog protocol, because it is the only one that appears to support image upload through Drupal (based on looking at the blogapi module code), although it doesn't actually make image nodes, just puts a file on the server. But, MetaWeblog doesn't seem to support taxonomy categories with any of the clients (although they download the categories and let you check them). I read that the Drupal blogapi MT protocol does, but it doesn't support image upload.

Is there a better solution to the seemingly very simple and basic issue of allowing users to upload an image, have it be made into a Drupal image node in a gallary, and include it (or a thumbnail link to it) in their posts, maybe even doing esoteric and advanced things such as as aligning the images to the right or in the center, plus type in some text with some basic WYSIWYG HTML formatting that is usable by the average AOL or Microsoft Word user?

Before i start i would like it noted this is not a flame or meant as an attack to the drupal commuity but just my observations after 1 week of drupal.

I've tried out many CMS systems and ran quite a few in post production sites for many years. I did indeed check out drupal many moons ago and was, quite frankly, less than impressed. I'm happy to say that this view has changed considerably.

I love the interface and in 4.7 RCx the ease of use of installing modules. I also like the flexibility the system brings with it and so far, all in all, the experiance has been quite rewarding.

One thing i must note however is the terms and acronymns used that are very confusing to new members, Nodes, taxonomy (still no idea what that means) and even head are extremely confusing. More confusing is the reliance on linux patches when im not running linux or have a dedicated server.

Granted CVS is normal for linux users but not so for windows savvy website developers. This sometimes causes inevitable frustration.

To give you an example.

I was running 4.6.6 but had actually tested the platform out on an online demo that was obviously running 4.7 RCx. After sometime in development of my site it was obvious some of the modules i needed had better capabilities in 4.7 and so i upgraded.

Obviously due to these being Pre production builds inevitable errors became apparant and of i went to find resolves. This is when i suddenly realised i was in a very different world, this aint cansas toto.