I've recently launched the Family Advocacy Movement (F.A.M) website developed using Drupal. Drupal totally rocks, and I've learned enough PHP along the way to implement some Drupal modules for the site. The first module I wrote was actually for my Nebraska Chess League site. That module defines a new content type for holding an attached PGN file and uses the jsPgnViewer.js I helped develop to view the game.

Next, I wrote yet another photo/video gallery module for Drupal because I wasn't happy with any of the ones I found. I wanted to be able to create a gallery page and attach a zip file with all the media and that would be all you had to do, and that's what my gallery does. This module will be used on the F.A.M. soon.

The core of the F.A.M. site, though, is a module I wrote called Shared Sites. It's vaguely similar to the Domain Access module, but without any of that module's bugs. Shared Sites allows the admin to configure dependent sites, the default set of which is based on the 50 U.S. states. Every site has the same layout and forums, but the content is keyed to that dependent site. Blogs are universal, however, but all the other content is filtered by the site (state) you are currently switched to.

So that's what I've been up to over the past two months or so, but hopefully I can get back to more blogging and chess playing soon! 

I've been taking a good look at Drupal lately. I have some new website projects I was getting ready to start coding, and thought maybe I should look at something like a CMS (content management system) instead. Of course I looked at java ones first, but quite frankly they sucked. That led me into the uncharted (for me) realm of PHP ones, so I grabbed Drupal and started playing around.

It took me a couple of days to get the hang of it, and figuring out what Views did for me was the longest bit. But once I got my head wrapped around most of Drupal's concepts and way of doing things, I was hooked. But then I talked to my brother.

Kevin had just started using another PHP CMS application called Joomla for his personal site. I figured I should take a peek, and off I went to download it and start playing around. At first I thought Joomla looked more advanced than Drupal - it certainly had more eye candy. Then I started adding some extensions like I had done with Drupal, and the bloom fell quickly from the rose. Half of the extensions flat didn't work right, and most I had to register with external sites to even download. I crawled back to Drupal begging forgiveness, and that is where I've spent all my time since.

Since one of my new sites is chess related I was hoping to find a PGN viewer module I could plug into Drupal, but no luck. I have one on NCL that I wrote in javascript and plugged into my java code there for uploading PGN files and viewing them. What I want now is a way to add that to Drupal. Not being a PHP or Drupal coder this might be painful, but I have added it to my infinitely long to-do list, somewhere around infinity/2.

In the meantime, I found it pretty easy in Drupal to create a PGN content type using the IFRAME module and linking that to games on the NCL site. It works pretty well and the playable game shows up on my Drupal site. Not as nice as uploading to Drupal directly, but I'll get there.