Drupal

Hey! Big ups and thanks to Sean Effel for putting on the the most recent Drupal Therapy workshop in San Francisco and inviting our executive director JD Lasica. JD said it was very helpful and he wished he had taken it years ago when he co-founded Ourmedia. Thanks Sean!

I turned on the Drupal "bookmark" module and you can now save bookmarks under your Ourmedia account. This is really handy for marking cool media that you find. To use this, just go to your account profile and check "User bookmarks".

I fixed the comments today for media posts. Not sure how things got to the way they were, but several issues where present:

• the IA module was not setting the comment field to 2 (allow comments) for new entries before saving them (that was the least of the bugs I found there; there were bigger issues with file records being saved with invalid node id's and the use of archived files in quota measurements).
• as a result, over 100,000 media records had comments field set to 0, which is off. I set all media records comments field values to 2 and so now commenting is back.

I am pleased to report that I have been successful at creating a single login for all ourmedia.org Drupal sites (even of different versions). It took a while to figure this out and in the end I used a combination of xmlrpc to sync sessions and changed the Drupal settings.php to allow for a shared cookie between all subdomains. It took me several days to figure this out as there were several bugs encountered along the way and lots of testing required (thank goodness many of my colleagues were at a conference and I could get some quality time to work on this - that's a rare opportunity these days). In the end, these posts turned out to have valuable information:

• http://drupal.org/node/74350
• http://drupal.org/node/110281
• http://drupal.org/node/117917

I upgraded the og and the views modules. I was hoping that this might bug JD and I are seeing that does not allow content admins to check the "public" box in a group post. I will have to try and find a patch for this bug. This is a necessary first step in that process.

JD indicated that he could no longer upload files under one of his accounts. I figured it was a quota somewhere. I googled "upload drupal quota" and found this post on drupal.org. It turns out that upload quotas are set by role. How nice. I increased the upload quota for site admins from 300MB to 500MB total for now. Will look into cleaning up eventually. This is in /admin/settings/upload (4.6) in case we need to bump again. Currently, max size per upload is set to 1MB for site and media admin roles.

I have been porting the Ourmedia-Downes theme for use with Channels. I was having a problem with the user profile display. It did not seem to be displaying correctly. No wonder, as it was looking for all kinds of things related to the media modules at Ourmedia.org. So I just renamed template.php and user_profile.tpl.php. Now things work great.

I tried something tonight. I copied the database from channels.ourmedia.org to nextgen.ourmedia.org. Seems to have worked without too many issues and now the two are more in sync for better testing. Had to turn back on the og_aggregator module and turn off the google analytics, but so far that is it. Seems like a reasonable way to update the test area at nextgen. I had already synced up their modules last night.

I have installed a few Drupal modules on this site (tools.ourmedia.org), including:

• dblclk - activated, available for site moderators only. allows you to double click links to edit blog posts and comments. Saves a lot of clicks and waiting.
• coder - not activated - useful for checking out new and custom modules.
• devel - not activated - useful for debugging.

We are in the process of migrating to Drupal 5.1

Here is just a short briefing as to where we are.

A staging environment has been setup.

• staging.ourmedia.org - Drupal 4.6
• ourmedia.spinxpress.net - Drupal 5.1

Here are notes about the modules being converted

• Homepage

Here are notes on contributed modules:

• relatedlinks - authors share and find related links with viewers
• dblclick - admins and authors double click to edit
• auto_nodetitle - generate title from post body for authors