-
Please support me in the 2010 Ride to Conquer Cancer - last year we were able to raise $6.9 million for the Alberta Cancer Foundation - hopefully we can raise even more in 2010! -
Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Apr
19
(2005)
Updating Drupal
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: drupal, weblogs.ucalgary.ca.
I just went through the first round of updating the Drupal installation on weblogs.ucalgary.ca – not as seamless as updating a Wordpress installation, but perhaps I’m a bit spoiled there…
If I hadn’t been using any non-stock modules or themes, it may have been a trivial update, but I had to tweak a whole bunch of MySQL tables used by modules (and re-install many of the modules themselves) in order to get things working.
Things still aren’t running 100%, but it’s close. I still need to figure out why the buddylist.module refuses to list the actual buddies, even though it can list the buddy’s posts…
While digging through the list of modules and themes that were updated for Drupal 4.6, I came across the Leaf theme – very nice. Kubrick-esque, but a bit cleaner for the amount of sidebar blocks that are being used in Drupal. I’m using it as the default theme for now (partially because it’s so much cleaner looking than SpreadFirefox – and being overly complex was the biggest single source of feedback I’ve received – and partially because SpreadFirefox still has issues with CSS clear declarations, and I don’t have time to go in and debug the theme at the moment).
It looks nice over there … we are trying to figure out if we want to upgrade or not … at the moment, things are working well and the new features, although strong, don’t make us want to jump out of our seats. The big problem I am running into, is that the blogs@si project is looking like my personal blog space. I am having a hard time getting even my staff to write. Everyone says that they are “nervous” to say something wrong or stupid … that’s what blogging is all about — free flow of ideas. Any advice for us?
The big thing that 4.6 offers that wasn’t available in 4.5 is RSS enclosures – podcasting out of the box. That’s something I want to experiment with on campus, so I’ll need the software in place to support that. Other than that, there are a bunch of (invisible) bug fixes. It broke a couple of the modules that I had installed, but they were hardly critical, so I just turned them off until updates for them are available.
As for the “how to get them blogging” issue… I don’t think you can “get” anyone to blog. I think the only thing we can do is to model it in practice, and to provide the tools to remove the barrier to entry. All of the users on the @ucalgary system are self-enrolled because they are curious. Less than half of the users have posted content (so far), but there are a handful of users who are posting semi-regular content.
I’ll be conducting a session at our “Faculty Technology Days” mini-conference on “Weblogs and Wikis in the University” – doing my part to demonstrate the stuff in action.
I’m also meeting today with Paul (my compadre in the @ucalgary.ca project) to discuss future plans etc…