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Request for Drupal help
Posted by Super G on October 24, 2006 - 9:20pm
Here's a post for the web developer types out there. The rest of you can tune out.
[Update by Super G on 10/24/06 at 9:56 PM EDT] This is not an open thread. Any off topic comments will be deleted.
Recently I've been exploring the possibility of moving The Oil Drum from Scoop to Drupal. I've gotten pretty far with the Drupal configuration, but there's one thing I'm stuck on—implementing DrumBeat. It's a pretty simple concept—automatically post a story at the same time everyday—but it seems to me that I can't implement it without doing a lot of work.
I posted on the Drupal forum, but didn't find what I was looking for. I think that the schedule module might be useful, but it lacks documentation. Anyway I'm not sure I have the PHP chops to write my own module. Are there any Drupal hackers out there that have advice or are willing to help out?
“Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.”
—George Eliot
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
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http://groups.drupal.org/soc-views-scheduler
http://groups.drupal.org/node/637#comment-1538
This is about the point where I would typically do some tinkering/experimenting.
Note: I'm not actually using this module. As much as I loved using/tinkering with Drupal, I moved back to Wordpress.
I would recommend creating a new user ID for these scripts and posts, so that you don't leave id's and passwords to more privledged users lying around.
Other peakoil websites that use Drupal include
Post Carbon Institute and associated sites.
Richard Heinberg
ASPO - Ireland
Portland Peak Oil (part of it)
City of Portland's Peak Oil Task Force
- Bart
I've also heard that Joomla is good, but I haven't played around with it at all.
http://wordpress.org/development/2006/10/mu-and-bbpress/
Looks like it could fill the multiple sites feature. Don't know about the rest of your requirements.
In addition it would be interesting to document the focus of the various peak oil sites and find a way to structure content syndication between the sites.
1st method - command line PHP. Interact directly with the database.
2nd method which will work no matter what you use:
Flat text file (or series of them) per day of drum beat (simple php page to make)
I use java, but you could use anything....you read in the flat text file(s) and generate a POST command via the SWING classes.
Run said java (or whatever) code as a batch job.
I'd use a perl script to post via the drupal site. It would be easier to talk to database directly, but maybe harder to maintain in the future over version and schema changes. I like things to break in small easy-to-track-down ways. Posting via a script keeps the black boxes separate.
I'm really curious about the pros and cons you use to decide. I'm fairly happy with drupal on one low volume site.
If you're stuck, I'll write you a script, but not till weekend. It would come in useful here as we are thinking of using something like Drumbeat ourselves. That would, however, be perl on linux. YMMV
cfm in Gray, ME
scheduler.module, but the problem is that it doesn't seem to be able to schedule repeating events. It's adequate for scheduling a single event, but not an event that occurs, say, every day. Please correct me if I'm wrong.Let me know if you want me to take a look.
Matt (mbaker at kohesion dot net)