Doing a good wiki in Drupal 6 is surprisingly hard. My project to create a site with MediaWiki-like functionality for climate research at UC Berkeley took much longer than I thought it would, and the result was mediocre. Here are my notes evaluating different modules:

Modules I ended up using

• Talk (6.x-1.5)
  • Function: Move the comments into separate tab.
  • Configure: Enable in Content Type -> edit -> Workflow settings (which is odd, should be Comment settings).
• Diff (6.x-2.0)
  • Function: Show what changed between one revisions.

The Drupal markup filtering system is confusing for a couple of reasons:

• The terms “format” and “filter” are used inconsistently. For example, the main admin page is title “Input formats”, but the url is “admin/settings/filters”. The best I can do is: The markup filter system consists of multiple input formats which are ordered stacks of individual filters.
• The term “Input format” itself is misleading, because the filters work on output, not input.
• The “Input format” admin page is unhelpful and hard to navigate.

Here is a use case that happens to me all the time, and I am boggled that I haven’t found a simpler solution. I have a bunch of Faculty nodes, and I want to specify that some of them belong to various Committees. I want a committees page that has a linked listing of committees, and then each committees page should have a description of the committee and a linked list of all the members. Also it needs to be dead simple for a non-skilled content editor to edit the committee descriptions and to create new faculty without needing to create all the committees ahead of time.

You can do almost all of this with Taxonomy free tagging and Views 2, but the easily editable per-committee description trips you up. For that you need a node type with a Reverse Node Reference. I am open to suggestions, but here is how I do it:

Backporting a Drupal 6 module with lots of Ajaxy goodness was more of a pain that I thought, but it is doable.

• Of course you have to do the obvious stuff, change the hook_menu items, your l() & url() calls, and the form API signatures.
• Garland’s content area is hard to target in Drupal 6, and completely impossible in Drupal 5. People who want to popupify Garland will just have to modify their page.tpl.php and change line 75 to:

I am really loving the improvements to subthemes in Drupal 6. They took what was an interesting idea in Drupal 5 and made it even more powerful and much easier to use. I have been finding a lot of power rolling out a sets of websites, using subsubthemes.

Theme X: Free theme downloaded from drupal.org
Theme Y: My modifications to that theme, as a subtheme of Theme X. I want these mods to apply to all my subsubthemes. base_theme = Theme X
Themes A, B, & C: The actual themes used on my sites. base_theme = Theme Y

The great thing about this setup is that I can continue to install updates to Theme X, with minimal disruption to my actual sites' themes. There was one problem though:

I was thinking about calling this article "Install Profile Considered Harmful". I know a lot of good people have put a lot of work into this feature, but as of Drupal 6 it seems to be a tar pit. People get excited about creating an install profile, waste some time banging their heads against it, and just move on. It is likely to keep improving, but for the present moment, you can do everything many of the things an install profile does, quicker and easier, by just creating an install module. Here's how.

I don’t believe I didn’t know this all these years. You can edit windows host file at C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, and add entries of the form:

127.0.0.1 foo.localhost
127.0.0.1 bar.localhost

Tip of the hat to wulff over at http://drupal.org/node/24454

I have been hearing about Drush, aka the Drupal Shell, for a while now, but have always been put off by the “Windows support is experimental.” message on the project page. But I finally got sick of all the clicking I need to do to download and enable new modules for evaluation. It took a bit of fuss to get it all configured, but boy was it worth it!

Here are the step needed to get Drush running on a Windows XP box:

I have released a new module, Popups: Add and Reference, which solves a problem that has been bugging me for years: creating a reference to a node that does not yet exist. The module adds a link to CCK’s Node Reference widget that makes it easy to add a new node without having to leave the edit page. It is built on top of my Popups module.

Registration for Bay Area Drupal Camp 2008 is open over at
http://badcamp.net/. I recommend signing up quick. We are going to push the attendance cap higher this year, but the camp is still almost a month away, and we already have over 125 people registered. And there is no way the space can handle the 400+ people that just showed up to DrupalCampLA this weekend.