Randomland.net - Test Site Discussion

[zourtney]

Does anyone have anything important sitting on the test site? I have a hankering to toss Wordpress back up there, just to see if it's useable.

Reasoning? I happened upon some post mentioning an Android app for posting to Wordpress blogs...and heck, if we post more content, it'd be worth it. And I'll bet there are useable image galleries!

Running Drupal is kind of like me owning a machine shop...awesome, with endless possibilites! But it's hard to use effectively and there's very little usable output. Oh, and did I mention I have the machine shop primarily because I wanted to make nice, shiny, perfect...um, nails? Yeah.
Um, [/rant], or something like that.

Let's give simplicity a try on the test site. Any takers?

[Nick]

The only thing I have on the test site are the views that I configured. But I saved their configs to the google docs thing.

There is an ok gallery for drupal 7, and its close to working all the way... The only thing it is missing is multiple file uploads at the moment, that and me being able to get it working on the site.

Why don't we create a wordpress.test.randomland.net and a drupal.test.randomland.net. Then we can compare and contrast.

I hate to abandon the power of drupal, but the 'it just works' of wordpress (not to mention its larger user base, and therefor greater number of community contributions) might be worth it. It feels like abandoning ones manual transmission for an automatic.  Really nothing wrong with it... but still.

[zourtney]

A sad, but fitting analogy. Which reminds me how much I miss that manual tranny...

But from time to time I come up with ideas to post to randomland. Sure, not doing so is at least 80% apathy. And I rarely have anything worth saying...but large part of the remaining 20% is related to me not wanting to fight its interface...7 is much, much better though.

And perhaps its slightly pathetic, but being able to toss up a "blog post" from my phone seems like something I should be able to do with ease. Right now, it's certainly not. The Drupal community disappoints me with its unproductiveness. (probably because it's a pain in the butt to extend...)

Just thought re-exploring our options sounded like a good idea. So sure, let's toss them both up there. (we could put them at test.randomland.net/[name], if that's easier...)

Options, options...

[Nick]

Both methods are equally easy. Just having a /whatever is fewer steps (and there is no need to wait for DNS to propagate) So lets go with that. Just throw up a directory page with links to all the sub-test sites on the root of 'test.'.

There is a module that lets you post entries via email... but I am sure its not easy to get the formatting you want.

[zourtney]

I remember that email thing. Sounds cool. It may be a bit of a pain to configure, though...who knows.

I would be slightly sad to ditch Drupal...but Randomland is just a playground. So I might as well be acquainted with the options out there!

I just downloaded it. It's at test.randomland.net/wp. It's not set up yet, though. Feel free...

Edit: ok, I set it up. It look like 5 minutes....including me looking up the SQL to create a new MySql user (not sure why I can't commit that to memory, but that's not the point). I installed the first gallery plugin I saw. And it works! Wordpress feels more refined than when we first tried it ('08?). Hmmm....a temptress.

Edit 2: and a mobile theme. Easy cheese.

[Nick]

Also, going down the wordpress lines, there appears to be a working and up-to-date bridge for SMF. So we could finally go with V2 of the forums.

[zourtney]

Hmmph. Drupal, you're looking awefully sad, these days...

[Nick]

Well, to be fair drupal 7 is brand new and no one wanted to make modules for it until it was complete. But still, they have had months and it shouldn't be that hard. All the basics are there. We are just missing a way to bulk-upload files into new, tagged nodes.

The draw back of wordpress is not having the nice taxonomy of drupal for tagging and searching the images. Though I am sure there is some sort of add on for it. I must play a little more. See if there is some missing thing that will drive me crazy.

If only I had more time... I could just make all the missing modules. But then I would lost what little social time I have as it is

[zourtney]

Creating Drupal modules is actually moderately painful. The API is well documented; how to do stuff is not. I had to read through a lot source code to figure out how to do simple things...it was the only way. Not to say I don't like the challenge...it's just incredibly time consuming to code trivial tasks.

Wordpress may or may not be better. I'm just "playing Devil's advocate," or whatever. I like the idea of actually using Randomland I can't really think of any advances features we are using...Randomland's actually pretty tame.

[Nick]

I played with the wordpress a little. Its a bit different and needs some additions. But I think we can make it work.

One thing we will likely want is a good gallery setup.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Photoblogs_and_Galleries
A little bit is detailed here.

I installed one plugin for tagging images and one (that does not seem to do anything) for showing exif data. But the above seem to take care of all that on one package. We will have to take a look. I would like to know if images are stored as their own 'pages' or what. And is it searchable on tags and titles/captions?

[zourtney]

I would like to know, too. I mostly like the idea of saving images as nodes with a title, text, short caption, and exif data...

[zourtney]

I installed a Twitter thingy on the Wordpress tester. Drupal had a decent one a while back but it stopped working and I never updated it. I was going to attempt the SMF bridge, but didn't get around to it.

[Nick]

I made two more word press installs while I was waiting (for only 10 seconds according to windows) for some files to copy. I will try out some of the 'photoblogging' plugins and gallery plugins to see what does what we want. And I think we agree, one image + discription to make an image 'node' and group by tags into collections. ??

[zourtney]

And I think we agree, one image + discription to make an image 'node' and group by tags into collections. ??

Yes. That's the rut my brain is stuck in, at least. It seems to be the most "lightweight" solution.

And for that matter, I am now of the opinion we should organize content similarly. Just tag posts with broad tags (like auto) and be done with it. My old ideas are total overkill for our utter lack of content.

[Nick]

 Seems like there might not be something like that for wordpress. Everything wants to make one picture per post, or have images added to galleries explicitly (then just linking to the image files or making a lightbox)

I guess another option might be to use the built in media gallery thing and use PHP to search tags and generate a gallery at run-time in a template.

This is from their gallery 'shortcode' page:
<?php
   $gallery_shortcode = '[gallery id="' . intval( $post->post_parent ) . '"]';
   print apply_filters( 'the_content', $gallery_shortcode );
?>

include
   comma separated attachment IDs, [gallery include="23,39,45"] will show only the images from these attachments.

Using the include option might do it.

Wordpress seems annoying in that everything is either a page or a post. There is a media library, with titles, descriptions and now tags for files. But there seems to be not way to view the media items on their own other then a direct link to the file, or making a dedicated post for them. I think this is why we went with Drupal before. Wordpress is very limiting. But it has MULTIPLE very nice bulk-upload tools. Makes me GRRRRR.



Edit:
I found how to view a media entry on its own:
http://test.randomland.net/wp/?attachment_id=15
By its attchment_id.