Drupal

RDN should look a bit better on your iPhone these days. I migrated the whole site over to an updated version of Drupal and then made some tweaks to auto-check for the browser-type and render appropriately for mobile devices, with some special attention paid to the iPhone.

There were some "canned" solutions for this I had hoped to use that wound up not working. I am also a bit disappointed in the state of the Drupal 6 series and hope Drupal 7 kicks some serious butt, otherwise I'll be heading elsewhere for content management.

I'll be tweaking the iPhone rendering over time, but I wanted to get something up quickly in the event folks feel the need to visit the site while mobile (or if you're using a mobile Twitter client and click a link that goes to a post I made here on RDN). Once I get a decent base I'll see about submitting it to drupal.org and will definitely post a "how to" here.

If anything is broken that you relied on, let me know in the comments and I'll try to get it back in. I went light with the modules this time and disabled some features.

UPDATE: It should look even better now. Added some additional CSS and a few elements from the iUI toolkit.  Continue reading »

Taking a cue from the fine folks at Microsoft, the Drupal gang released a slew of patches today (seven of them to be exact). Security details here, general update info here and Drupal 5.6. download here.

You can also grab Drupal 6.0 RC2 since it incorporates all of the security patches as well.

If you're one of the few, cool folks who comment here @ RDN or have just been lurking, waiting for that perfect post to arise that was worthy of your €0.013, I wanted to make you aware that I installed the spam-filtering akismet module today.

Drop me mail (bob at my self-named hosted mail net address) if you get rejected so I know I need to turn it off or tweak it a bit.

The fine folks over @ Drupal announced the first release candidate for the 6.x code stream. [NOTE: RDN is powered by Drupal]

There are *tons* of new features including a better installer, core support for OpenID, "actions" and "triggers" for a horde of Drupal system events and significantly improved handling of internationalization (more info on features on the beta announcement page).

If you run your own site and aren't using Drupal, you should be. The developer community behind it is amazing and highly talented, there is a serious commitment to security and they've garnered support from "big names" like Sun and Google. What are you waiting for? Stop reading this an go download it now!

For some reason, iTheme was bugging me. It may have been the excessive rounded corners. Perhaps it was the typographic idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies. Kubrick has always "felt" right and it seems to play nice with Safari now, so it's up until I can come up with something better on my own.

I just need to get an iPhone CSS file customized for it.

Let me know if you have any theme suggestions.

The folks over at RoopleTheme have made an awesome, non-blog theme for Drupal 5+ called LiteJazz.

I can think of a ton of uses for it (and am contemplating working up something to modernize this site I do some work for).

A random glance through the Drupal themes page shows many new themes by some talented designers.

I started off this post in Microsoft Word 2007, but am finishing it up right in Drupal.

The new Microsoft Office supports posting to online blogs and it even supports the MetaWeblog API that Drupal offers as one of it's API choices.

Formatting works (not heavily tested) along with setting the post title. Categories do not work (after a cursory test) and images are going to be challenging without using WebDAV.

The resulting HTML that it throws into the post is very reasonable. It even handles editing and re-posting older entries.

Not a bad feature if you're using Office already and just need to post something very quickly.

If you're running a Drupal-based site and haven't checked out the mailhandler module, go over there now and take a look at it. With mailhandler, you'll be able to post to your site with a simple e-mail message and have complete control over where and how it gets published. There's a decent command reference for mailhandler in the module documentation if you need the basic info covered.

For those using Google's GMail service (hosted or plain ol' GMail) for your communication needs, you're going to have a problem with mailhandler. While the module does support POP3 access, it doesn't support secure POP3 access which GMail requires (which is A Good Thing). To make mailhandler work, you need some way to get from insecure POP3 to secure POP3 and this is where stunnel comes in.

Download stunnel from the link above and get it installed (.configure; make; make install should work for you *nix folks, *BSD/OS X folks have ports access and there's a pre-compiled binary for Windows). Once you do that, have it run on the Drupal host with the following syntax: stunnel -c -d 1109 -r pop.gmail.com:995

Windows folks might have to use the stunnel.conf configuration method and make sure something like:

client = yes

; Service-level configuration

[pop3s]
accept = 1109
connect = pop.gmail.com:995

is in there.

In your mailhandler configuration, you just need to make sure the domain is set to localhost and the port is set to 1109.

The only other "gotcha" with the mailhandler module is that you'll most likely need to make sure that php is compiled with the --with-iconv option (and, thus, have libiconv installed).  Continue reading »