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Thu, 10/09/2008 - 02:56 — kyle

A status update for everyone, the Dot update is in progress. Both myself and the other person working on it have been pretty bogged down by school, but some of the final pieces are coming together.

First, the style is 95% done. It's really awesome, I think people are going to like it.

Second, I have a script running for porting all of the old stories from the Dot to Drupal. Stories are importing correctly (with correct categories :), and comments are importing correctly (minus comment threading). There is an absolutely huge amount of stuff from the Dot. As the title related, there are around 2,200 stories and about 94,000 comments. I need to get user account creation down, but that shouldn't take too much work.

Third, the comment moderation module is basically done and has been for awhile. There is a javascript bug, but beyond that it has been working fine.

There are other details to take care of, but Drupal offers a lot of compelling features and I'm really looking forward to them. One I'm really looking forward to is content translation. Also, it should be very easy for the Dot editors and content translators to do their work. Also, once Drupal is in place it will offer us a platform which we can innovate off of.

Stay tuned, things will be coming soon and you won't want to miss them.

Comments

Fri, 10/10/2008 - 01:11 — Anonymous (not verified)

In my experience it's better

In my experience it's better to work with node_import and a bit of glue code, but I'll leave that to you. What version of drupal are you working with? I've started with Drupal 4, and since then, the whole basis was wrapped inside out. No old module works with the new drupal versions and there is rarely an update path. So, yes, Drupal is nice and all, but no, it doesn't give you a stable basis to develop upon.
Sat, 10/11/2008 - 19:39 — kyle

Small Module

The module up to this point is pretty small, and a lot of the Code is just forms API stuff. It correctly imports categories, posts and comments. I think it has a lot of value because it will allow anyone with a wordpress blog to switch over to Drupal pretty easily. It is also going to take care of creation of users so that posts can maintain authorship info.

This is using Drupal 6. As far as having a stable upgrade path I'm not too worried about it. For the most part, the worthwhile modules out there provide upgrade paths (such as views, cck, webforms, etc.). If you're using modules without an upgrade path than chances are you're simply using the wrong module.

Thu, 10/09/2008 - 18:46 — Anonymous (not verified)

"comments are importing

"comments are importing correctly (minus comment threading)"

Uh, aren't comments worthless without the threading?
Sat, 10/11/2008 - 19:33 — kyle

Nope

Lots of sites have comments that aren't threaded. So I'd call that pretty useful. Making the comments threaded is just a hair more work.
Thu, 10/09/2008 - 18:31 — Bugsbane (not verified)

Awesome!

Sounds awesome! Thanks for all your work on this Kyle. The whole community will benefit from this, and as such owes you a very large thankyou. I'm looking forward to seeing how the new look is turning out, and giving it a try. I'm sure it'll rock. :D Go Kyle! Go KDE!
Thu, 10/09/2008 - 09:25 — mxttie (not verified)

drupal showcase

hi kyle, sounds really exciting! it would be interesting if you could find the time to write a post mortem and post it on drupal.org :) (I think it belongs somewhere under cases? http://drupal.org/cases ) I'm really interested in hearing your experiences while porting a custom cms to drupal.
Thu, 10/09/2008 - 13:36 — kyle

Not quite custom

Well, it isn't really custom, it's squishdot which is a variation on Zope. Additionally, everything was exported as a Wordpress eXtended RSS file (WXR) and thus I'm more or less making a wordpress import module for Drupal :). Moving on to kde.org will be much more interesting.
Fri, 10/10/2008 - 03:35 — mxttie (not verified)

*lamp*

ah, ok :) I guess this also finally explains to me why it is called the dot ;)