Drupal

After spending the better part of two weeks criticizing the News-Gazette for their amazingly bad new website design, I need to finally do some upgrading and re-designing here.

My intention is to take the site offline sometime late this afternoon or evening, run an upgrade, and hopefully redesign the site.  I have some plans in mind, including some old ideas from here, but if you have requests please let me know.

No old posts or comments will be lost or moved, and your user profiles will remain, etc.  My goals are better performance and security, a cleaner design that allow for a little more advertising, and more stable user experiences as it relates to registration, spam and posting/commenting. 

Wish me luck....

UPDATE:  After multiple attempts, I kept running into an update problem that would corrupt the database that stores our posts, comments, site configuration, etc.  While I'm convinced this is karmic payback for my criticism of the News-Gazette's redesign,
I do need to enlist some more help and do a little more research.  At some point soon, I'll try again.  Thanks for your patience - you may resume using the site as if nothing has happened.  (Thank goodness for backups...)

I've updated the site software and some modules to the latest versions, in response to a report of disappearing comments, mostly because I have no explanation other than a security hole.  If you notice any strangeness, please let me know.

Thanks.

UPDATE:  Of course, as soon as I completed the update, the server got flaky for unrelated reasons.  Please do let me know if you notice anything out of place, though.

The great folks at Drupal, which is the software used to publish this site, have just released a major upgrade to v6.0.  I'm going to start playing around with it on a test site before upgrading here, while also waiting for the bugs to get ironed out of the new release. 

We will upgrade here as soon as practicable, as I'm very excited about some of the new features, and that upgrade may include some policy changes.  Specifically, I'm thinking of requiring registration or a valid email address to comment, as well as allowing universal access to the front page.

If anyone has any suggestions or ideas for site features or policies (or any old suggestions that I've been ignoring) now would be a great time for me to see if I can implement them.  I've always said that this site is only as good as the commenters make it, so your input is very much wanted and your ideas will absolutely be considered.

Of course, if anyone has knowledge in CSS or mySQL and wants to help, I'd love any assistance I can get.  I had a great helper when IP.com first switched to Drupal 4.x over a year ago, but everything else I've learned the hard way.  :-)

In an effort to keep myself sorta-organized, I've created a Task List of things I'd like to fix, improve and/or implement on IlliniPundit.com.  (First item: fix the links so they're easier to spot!)

You can view the list here.

I'll be updating it and linking to it as I make progress, and hopefully you'll make suggestions as we go along and I can add those to the list.  With that in mind, comments are closed on this post, but open on the Task List itself.

Thanks, and pardon our dust.

Many of you really like the "Latest Comments" box over on the right for quick access to the most recent comments on the site. I know this because the complaints were loud and frequent when that little box disappeared for a few weeks.

However, in my opinion, there's a similar site tool that works even better:  the Tracker, which you can find in the menu bar just below the banner logo at the top of the site.

Click on "Tracker," and you'll see a bigger version of this:

This is a listing of the threads with the most recent activity, including a column ("replies") that shows you how many comments each thread has gotten, along with the number of comments that have been posted since you last visited the site.  I've circled some example links in the graphic above ("13 new" and "2 new").  By clicking on those links on your Tracker page, you can go directly to the comments section of a particular thread, and you'll jump right to the first comment that is new to you.  (The site uses cookies to determine which content has been created since you last visited).

If you're not already using it, please give it a try, and see if it makes site navigation a little easier for you.  And let me know in the comments if you find it to be useful.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I've upgraded the site from Drupal 4.7.4 to 5.1, much sooner and more hastily than I had hoped to do.

Yesterday, for no apparent reason, I and other registered users were unable to remain logged in to the site, preventing posting and site administration.  This was evidently a Drupal-specific problem for which there is no fix, so rather than wait for one, upgrading was recommended as a solution.

So we're upgraded.  I've still got some things to tweak.

• Author and timestamp information underneath each post is missing
• Node moderation is off
• Technorati is off
• Statcounter is off
• There's an annoying "log message" box underneath the "blog entry" box that has no use for us

On the bright side, the new version will hopefully allow me to allow users to choose from among multiple themes, and do some other interface tweaking that will make the site more flexible and powerful.  And the site appears to be faster now - the administration side is certainly faster.

I'll be tweaking things for the next few days, but everything should be working almost normally.  Please comment here or email me if you experience any oddness.

And thanks for your patience.  This place is a never-ending series of challenges for me, but I sure am learning an awful lot.

Drupal 5.0 has been released.  (And today is Drupal's sixth birthday!)

We'll be upgrading here eventually, but after all the problems we've had over the past few months, it's going to be a few weeks before we do upgrade, and we'll run a test site first.

My main concern is that the modules we use must be 5.0 compatible, especially the "Recently Commented On"/Live Discussions module.

I'm also going to hold off on releasing any new themes or features until we upgrade, and instead concentrate on posting some "how to" articles about the new features of this site that I've never fully explained before.

Stay tuned, and thanks for being here in the first place.

As you can see, there's a new block over on the right called "Recently Commented On" which lists the 20 threads which have the most recent comments.  The thread with the most recent activity is on top.  This isn't perfect, but it's better - I'm hoping to add a date/timestamp to each link, indicating when that thread last had activity.
Also, I made a handful of tweaks to the CSS to make the site less blocky.  Hopefully that helps a little bit.  I have a list of some other suggestions that I'm also investigating over on my test site, but I won't roll them all out at once. 

I would, however, like to add another theme so that registered users can choose a completely different look if they like.  That may take me until Christmas, however.

As for improving the speed of the site, I'm working on that too - it may involve another hosting change.  But my speed seems very good, in both IE7 and FF.  Would you please comment with how yours has been, and what kind of browser and connection you're using?

Thanks - please keep the suggestions coming, as I really am keeping a list of them and considering them all.

To view the blog of a registered user, go to www.illinipundit.com/USERNAME (i.e., www.illinipundit.com/mark-shelden).

• This will show you a page with the blog entries of only that user.
• Each registered user's blog also has a feed, at www.illinipundit.com/USERNAME/feed (i.e., www.illinipundit.com/mark-shelden/feed)

UPDATE:  I'm an idiot - if you were using the Feedburner feed to subscribe to our RSS feed, please continue to do so.

Welcome to the latest incarnation of IlliniPundit.com, now published on Drupal, a more flexible, powerful and scaleable content management system than WordPress, our old engine. 

Things look different around here, and there are some significant changes.

• Every registered user (even non-authors) can create their own blog entries – but only featured authors (meaning you!) will automatically appear on the front page
• Blog entries can be promoted to (and off) the front page through the votes of readers
• Every registered user will have their own blog at www.illinipundit.com/USERNAME
• Every registered user’s content is syndicated (has its own RSS feed)
• Avatars, comment signatures, and the choice of a low-bandwidth mobile-friendly theme for registered users
• WYWIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) composing and editing for content
• A “Tracker” link just below the header banner, which you can use to show recently updated content of all types in one location.

You can do so with an anonymous username, although you’ll need to give us a working email address, although you can even get an anonymous email address with gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or any number of other options.

Once you register, you’ll want to go here for some basic instructions on how the site works. But if you have questions, please don’t hesitate to ask me via email – or, even better, post your question in an Open Thread or there on the Instructions Page and then everyone can help you.

Also, our feed address has changed, but that is both a positive development and a negative.

• The negative: Our feed used to be provided by Feedburner, a fantastic company. Drupal and Feedburner don’t play well together, so if you read this site using RSS, you’ll need to update your subscriptions. Our new general site feed address is here.
• The positive: Everything has its own feed now – you can subscribe to a feed for the entire site, for any and every individual registered user’s blog, individual threads, categories, etc. All the content on IP.com is now syndicated, and you can find it all here.

This new engine is going to present some challenges, and there are going to be questions and problems which I’ve not anticipated. I’m going to leave this thread stickied to the top of the front page (another new feature!) - please post your comments, suggestions, ideas and gripes in the comments of this thread, and we can figure this out together.

Thanks for your patience, your trust, and most of all, for your participation. This really is a community-driven site now, and I wanted the engine, design and features to reflect that. Now, as always, let us know what you think.