Any drupal experts out there?

Apr 02, 2008 02:22

http://www.eastercon.org is currently running on a Drupal system ( Read more... )

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alexmc April 2 2008, 08:54:00 UTC
I've stayed clear of trying to find assistants just in case the problem was *me* asking!

;-)

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alex_holden April 2 2008, 07:31:43 UTC
I recommend Mediawiki - that's what Year of the Teledu used and what I'm using on Conbledegook.

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alexmc April 2 2008, 08:53:17 UTC
(Remember I installed both the Eastercon Drupal and Mediawiki for YotT. I am not tied to either one)

I have suggested moving to MediaWiki - but several people think it *didnt* work well for YotT. However if it keeps Chris happy.... :-)

It also requires a certain number of people to be authorized to edit pages. MediaWiki is not geared up for being "public read only, specific users can edit". It can do it - but not well.

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alex_holden April 2 2008, 09:07:56 UTC
Certain people disliked the YotT wiki for four reasons:

* Anonymous edits were allowed so it got constantly spammed (until after the con when we locked it down to registered users and it hasn't been spammed since).
* The programme grid was huge and difficult to edit. I don't think it would have been any easier to edit it using a different table syntax. Reformatting it into multiple smaller tables might have helped.
* The programme item pages used templates. These actually made it easier to create a new item in the correct format once you worked out how to add and fill in the template.
* It wasn't obvious how to create a new page (just search for the non-existent page title then click on 'create this page'). This could have been explained on the front page.

There was also a perception that because it was possible for any member to edit the site, you had to edit it yourself instead of working through a webmaster or other admin.

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alexmc April 2 2008, 09:43:19 UTC
Hmmm, I am happy to accept all those criticisms. But I am not sure if they apply to a non-specific Eastercon site.

So maybe moving to MediaWiki is the right thing to do.

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epocalypse April 2 2008, 07:52:01 UTC
It's all about the add-ons, chuck on CAPTCHA to try and stop the spammers and Bad Behaviour is reasonably useful too.

CAPTCHA also comes with a number of add-on modules to customise it.

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alexmc April 2 2008, 08:51:08 UTC
I can quite easily add captcha to the existing Drupal site. It just requires a certain number of round tuits.

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akicif April 2 2008, 08:31:43 UTC
I use PmWiki both for work and for non-work stuff (http://www.night-watch.net for example): Securing it is pretty much a doddle - you have a standard .htpasswd file with userids and passwords in it, and a .htgroups file that indicates which groups users are in, and after that everything is pretty much infinitely tunable in terms of who can see and edit what - even down to the page level if you want.

There's an extremely active pmwiki community, and lots of really useful add-ons appearing all the time (ones I use include the blogging functionality, which, with RSS, handles our news announcements, an event calendar (which can also have an RSS feed or, I think, talk to iCal). The one thing I've not got working is OpenId, which is annoying as it means you can have authentication tied to membership of an LJ community or friends list.

(it *may* become possible to log into http://akicif.info/ [ETA2: forgot the mod_rewrite] as today ( ... )

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alexmc April 2 2008, 08:50:31 UTC
It is worth mentioning that the existing Drupal site is quite old and needs redoing from scratch.

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