Drupal 4 Bloggers

August 9th, 2007

Migrating to WordPress

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It is not an easy decision but I finally switch over to WordPress. For the last 3 years, I run my blog on a customized Drupal called Drupal 4 Bloggers. It has sentimental values for me since, well, I coded it.

But Drupal 4 Blogger is more like a personal project. It was great 3 years ago, with all the bells and whistle I need but compared to wordpress today, it is a farcry. I have no choice but to admit that wordpress is a much better platform.

Of course, I could stick to Drupal, take the latest version and try to customize it again. But being there done that, I think I will stick to the best tool of the time now.

September 3rd, 2004

Drupal 4 Blogger v0.11

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Just release Drupal for Bloggers V0.11. One of the new feature in this release is an inclusion of a greylisting (administer->comments->black/white list).

The story behind this is there is this spammer (by the name of Chan Keng Yik1) who google for ‘Bill Gates’ and somehow found one of my old blog entry. Initially, he just spam the entry which I zapped. But somehow, the idiot actually thought that this is actually Gates’ blog and started visiting that entry daily and posting silly craps, e.g. anti-MS, pro-Linux2, taunting Gates and stupid stuff like how he wants to migrate to Australia in extremely bad English.

Well, I could blacklist his IP at my website and be done with it. But he is a dial-up user from one of the Malaysia ISPs, I have to blacklist the entire ISP if I want to block him out which is obviously not an acceptable solution.

And thats how greylisting idea is borned. Instead of outright banning, comments from blacklisted IPs will be put onto moderated queue. So he can continue to post his craps to that entry which don’t get publish. The downside is that any comments from Malaysia would be on the moderation queue until I okay them…not a big problem.

After a week of posting and not getting thru, he finally gave up. *phew*

1 I didnt put up any link to him so he wont get any google juice from me. But you can easily google Chan Keng Yik (from Taiping/Malaysia) if you are interested.

2 If the stupid “bird” (as he called himself) actually reads my blog, he would have realize I am an OSS supporter altho I wouldn’t call myself an anti-MS. (And why should these two position be mutually exclusive?)
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August 3rd, 2004

Day 2 at IETF

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I found out I left my power adaptor in the airport lounge in LAX and now stuck here with a risk of power shortage :P Luckily, Andrew was kind enough to visit Frys1 with me yesterday and I got a new power adaptor. The bad news is the Frys only have this ridiculous looking adaptor and it looks really dumb! :P

Anyway, I attended the Application Area meeting. Tim Bray gave an update of ATOM and what it aims to achieve and I just subscribe to the mailing list. I might just work on ATOM support in D4B but Tim asked me to hold back for a few more months as the specs is under going a major change.

The other thing thing that interest me is MARID. Marshall Rose gave an presentation on SenderID and he is pretty confident he can wrap things up in August. That’s a very good news :-)

1 I remember I bought my first digital camera from this Frys in 2000. I was here with Maynard and we were arguing who gets the last digital camera they have left :-)

July 10th, 2004

Drupal 4 Blogger v0.10

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Just release Drupal for Bloggers V0.10.

There are several changes with this release: Mainly, this is brought up-to-date with Drupal 4.4.2 so all the bugfixes from 4.4.1 to 4.4.2 is now integrated into D4B.

Captcha is also rewritten as a separate module and can be enabled not only for comments but also user registrations, forums, stories books etc.

D4B v0.10 also provide a tool1 for users who wish to migrate from 4.4.x to D4B. See UPGRADE.txt for more information.


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July 4th, 2004

Drupal for Bloggers v0.9

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Having some time today, I done some hacking on Drupal for Bloggers today and release v0.9. Foremost, I ported my popular MT Security Code (CAPTCHA) plugin to D4B.

CATPCHA which stands for ‘Completely Automated Public Turning test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart’ can be enabled to prevent bots from spamming comments. When posting comments, Users would be shown a graphic image with some text which they will have to entered manually. While it is an effectively way to stop bots, it is critizes for been unfriendly to the visual handicaps. CAPTCHA requires PHP to be compiled with GD support.

You can enable CAPTCHA for anonymous users or for all users. ;-)

This version also have several new features requested by D4B users such as (a) displaying the image while managing uploaded files (b) remember anonymous user contact info (c) atom support (altho not enabled by default). It also have several important bugfixes, particularly on RSS and subscriptions’ emails.

June 23rd, 2004

Migrated to Drupal

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I finally migrated to Drupal 4 Blogger today. It is about time that I do this myself and eat my own dog food. Hopefully this would help to dig out the bugs but so far, so good! But I dont promise this to be perfect so please report any problem and bear with it for a while.

I look forward doing blogging without having to wait for rebuilding and without MT hogging 99% of the CPU when rebuilding. :-)

ps: Oh yea, migration is done using mt-to-drupal.

June 12th, 2004

MT to Drupal Migration Tool

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I just hack up an alternate method to migrate from MT to drupal. Download mt2drupal.tar.gz.

This is a perl script written as an MT-plugin, utilizing on MT libraries to export the data directly into Drupal database (limitation: only for MySQL for now). So unlike http://drupal.org/node/view/6141, you do not need to generate large intermediate php files and the migrated entries will not be stored as HTML.

The script can migrate from MT to Drupal 4.4.1, Drupal CVS and also Drupal 4 Bloggers. It will migrate:

a) all your bloggers
b) all your defined categories
c) all your entries including body, excerpt, extended (in 4.4.1 & CVS, it is stored as bodyextended and in D4B formatting rules are also preserved)
d) all your comments (with anonymous support, in CVS and D4B)
e) all incoming trackbacks (stored as comments)
f) all your outgoing trackbacks (D4B only)
g) all your trackbacks trackers (D4B only)

It will also keep your permalink by using URL aliases in Drupal. (enable path.module). You can also migrate MT into an existing Drupal installation. You can see the migrated site of this blog at http://james.seng.sg/dblog/ (Running D4B of cos :-)

Disclaimer: While I tried to test it as much as I can and that it works for me, I give no assurance it will work for you. So backup all your database before you attempt this.

June 8th, 2004

Drupal 4 Bloggers v0.7

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simple-screenshot-small.PNGJust release Drupal 4 Bloggers v0.7. This is a major release with lots of changes and bugfixes.

One of the most difficult to use Drupal as a blog is customzing the look-and-feel. It is almost impossible to do without some php programming knowledge which is beyond most bloggers – you are pretty much struck with what Drupal themes offers. This is one area where MT definately shines with its simple to use template tags. Well, wait no more! You can do likewise in Drupal 4 Bloggers v0.7 now :-)

There are also numerous bugfixes including the autodiscovery in trackbacks (thanks to drumm and crschmidt) and I also fold the contributed patch from mervissen. Thanks!

Please note that there are four database changes in this release. Please read the release notes before attempting to upgrade. As usual, bugs, patches and feature requests would be appreciated.

ps: Incidently, I need some help to document down the tags you can use for templating. Email me if you wish to help! Thanks.

June 2nd, 2004

Drupal 4 Bloggers v0.6

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Sorry for nearly two weeks of silent. Was busy catching up with day work after my Brunei trip. Anyway, tomorrow is a holiday for me so I burned some midnight oil to do some hacking and release just release Drupal 4 Bloggers v0.6.

The major change in this version is Blog APIs which means you can use your favorite blogging tool (mine are ecto and Zempt) to post your blog entries :-) And yes, the APIs have been enhanced such that it recongize extended and excerpt entries. I also fixed the bug that will allow you to change the posting time via the tool. Oh, you can even upload files and images via the Blog API now! Take a tour at my demo/dev site. :-)

Two things left before I shall make my big move to Drupal: (1) Templating (2) MT Migration scripts. For the latter, there is some work done by Morbus Iff which would really save me a lot of time. Nevertheless, I think I might still do a simplier one-click migration tool because I dont like keeping my entries in HTML as Morbus’ method will do.

There are also some activities on the Drupal-Blog mailing list which I started for the project. Thanks for all the feedback and as usual, bug reports are welcome!

May 20th, 2004

Leaving for Brunei

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I am flying to Brunei in a few hours time for the APT-ITU IDN/ENUM Workshop. The workshop is kind of perfect for me since it deals with two of my area of interests. I am giving presentation on both track, on IDN and also ENUM. And I will be catching up with old friends…and going to have our 2nd APEET face-to-face meeting.

Oh, I havent forgot about the Drupal 4 Bloggers. I intended to finish hacking blogapi.module (so it is upgraded to support some of the new features in Drupal 4 Bloggers) before next release but I better release a cut today before I leave.

So grab your V0.5 which includes some bugfixes on blog module and some enhancement on taxonomy. You will also see some patches to blogapi.module but that’s not complete yet!

I will be gone for 3-4 days. But I already setup my Mac (thanks to PHP Apache Module for Mac OS) with Druapl installation so I can do some programming on the plane. Todos on the list is Blogapi, and MT Migration tools.