site design

So you're editing a Story node in Drupal, and... Wait, was it a Story? Or was it a Page node? Or is the node you're editing actually a Blog Entry?

When you create a node, Drupal gives you a big-letter reminder of what you're making: "Create Story" (or whatever the node type is) appears at the top of the creation form. Yet when you later edit the node, there's no easy reminder of what the node type. Clues in the path, the visible fields, or elsewhere may give it away to the experienced site builder, but not to a newcomer admin to the site. And to be sure, you won't often care what the node type is when making some small edits, but then again you might find yourself scratching your head as you stare at the edit form for a node someone else made, thinking that you'd like to make this change if it's a Story but that change if it's a Page...

There's a nice and very simple tip at the Josiah Ritchie blog to aid future editors (including yourself) on this small point.

In Drupal 6 and browsers make nice-nice!, I got all happy over the Safari 4 beta abolishing several bugs that had kept me from using Safari as my Drupal site admin tool.

However, I failed to post a crucial follow-up to that: it wasn't long before a new oddity forced me to toss Safari out the door once more. The problem was in buttons, such as those for opening a "Choose file..." dialogue when uploading an image. Sometimes – not in any way I could predict – buttons would be dead in the Safari 4 beta, doing nothing when clicked. That's an annoyance during general web use (such as when trying to submit a comment somewhere), but a show-stopper for admin work. 

The problem persisted even after the official Safari 4 launch, so it wasn't a beta problem alone. Yet a search on the Apple support forums and elsewhere didn't turn up people with a similar problem, so clearly it wasn't a real Safari problem at all. That's where I lapsed out of my usual vegetative state just long enough to remember that I had a couple of old third-party Safari plug-ins installed, Inquisitor and Safari Stand. They're both nifty tools, and perhaps later I'll play with Safari 4-tested versions, but at least one was gumming up the works; removing both has fixed the problem.

It's only been a few days, but so far I haven't found any problems remaining when using Safari for admin work on Drupal 6. Great! And there's a big bonus, as well: Apple's playing up blazing JavaScript speed as Safari 4's forte, and it's really making a difference on my iMac. Dialogues for images, links, and so on in TinyMCE pop up so much faster now than they do in Firefox. (And as a small bonus, the Top Sites feature is handy for quickly getting at any number of sites in progress.)   

I may want to head back to Firefox at times to use some specific web developer plug-in, but for general admin work, Safari 4's speed alone is making me happy all over again. Until the next show-stopping bug, that is...

Good God, I've been at the graphics software again. Restraining order be damned, I say!

The work I've now dubbed SEO, Traffic, and Revenue: Drupalace's Online Manual (STARDOM) is still very much in progress, with the next round of updates in the oven. But now that the upgrade to Drupal 6 is mostly taken care of, and a new theme garishly under way, I'll take up the long-neglected task of announcing the thing, and coughing up a STARDOM logo.

Next up: After upgrading more sites to D6, and putting up more STARDOM content, I'll start applying STARDOM how-tos to those sites. With stellar results, I'm sure. : ) (Or is that : /  ?)

Yow! It's an all-new look! And not a great one, either – though that's my fault, not that of the wonderful 4 Seasons theme currently sitting in as a theme placeholder. (Text size or color not to your liking? See spiffy controls at upper left.)

The uprade to Drupal 6 is comple... no, most certainly not completed. It didn't go down all creamy smooth, and there are plenty of bugs to work out. Okay, the old Drupalace theme doesn't work here, but that's fine; I was tired of it anyway, and wanted to a take a fresh and more proper start. All my Images attached to nodes were also out of action for quite a while, too – though lo, they're back! Good. Alas, all my old Views remain AWOL – and all menu items attached to those Views are vanished. I'm hunting them down. Punishments may be in store.

Lots of other features remain to be restored, but overall things are working. I've got some notes to share on the upgrade; stay tuned!

Following up on Checking out Drupal 6: Installation: I was back to playing with Drupal 6 again, as I'm really itching to upgrade all of my old Drupal 5 sites. 

This time, I went beyond playing with my "sandbox" site; I got started on constructing two new, fresh sites. (Of course, I do so on the back of that sandbox site's database; that was the purpose of making the thing!)

Module trouble!

Enabling a number of spiffy D6 modules knocked my Modules form out of action, leaving it to forlornly display only this error:

Fatal error: Unsupported operand types in <path to my Drupal installation>/includes/common.inc on line 1376

Blech. Other pages still worked, but life's no fun with the Modules form AWOL. Gotta find and shut down the offending module(s)... but, oops, how to do that when I can't even see the form?

No trouble for the pros; there are doubtless many ways to tackle the problem. But for fellow pre-pros who might be thrown into panic by something like this, here's my own fumbling way of going about a fix: