I'm not doing much Drupal work these days, so I'll be giving up the server that I use to host this blog. Based on some of the comments I've received, it seems that some of the articles here have been useful, so I've copied everything across to a blog at wordpress.com. You can find it at http://state68.wordpress.com/.

I'll keep the blog here for a little while just in case it's got any PageRank value, but I won't be adding any new content. Thanks for reading and commenting; I hope what I've written has been useful.

You might have encountered the terms "Drupal distribution" or "install profile" at some point, and wondered what they mean. I did. They sounded pretty cool: a way of setting up a Drupal website which has a load of modules pre-installed, and even some configuration options already set up. Every time I start building a website with Drupal I have to go through the same steps - installing certain modules and themes, setting up certain user roles and permissions, etc. - and if these distributions or install profiles can help with that, so much the better.

Over the past couple of weeks I've spent quite a lot of time working on getting my Drupal module, Custom Submit Messages ready for a 1.0 Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 release, and helping fix a few other issues that were floating about the Drupal.org issue queues.

One of the most off-putting things about Drupal 7 for new users is the fact that it ships without a WYSIWYG editor. We've been used to using WYSIWYG editors for a number of years, so Drupal forcing us to edit in plain text or HTML is confusing.

Edit: while chatting this through with a couple of friends on Facebook, it seems that I need to put more thought into my backup strategy. Please see my comment at the bottom of this post :)

I've finally got around to pushing my module, Custom Submit Messages, to its fifth alpha, and the end certainly seems to be in sight with regards to getting the module an official 1.0 release.

This release is a complete re-write that strips out the code that was used to actually change the messages, and replaces it with the methods provided by Michael Barton's excellent Status Messages Alter module.

The Drupal community thrives on being a "do-ocracy": if you encounter a problem with some aspect of Drupal - a module, a theme, or Drupal core itself, for example - you can, and should, try to fix the problem yourself.

This tutorial shows you how to install the Git version control system on a Mac. It assumes a little familiarity with the Command Line. If you don't know how to use the Command Line, then check out Addison Berry's excellent series of video tutorials over at lullabot.com: you can find the first one here and the rest here.

Migrating a Drupal site from one development platform to another can be a real pain. Nicole Bluto wrote a great blog post for the 2009 LA Drupalcamp on how to migrate a Drupal 6 site cleanly:

http://www.drupalcampla.nicolebluto.com/node/3

Here's a distilled, step-through version of that post, tested between two OS X accounts, both running XAMPP:

The export

1. Download and install http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate
2. Navigate to admin/content/backup_migrate

One of the great things about the Drupal 6 theme system is that it's possible to make sub-themes of themes that already exist. This means that if you like a particular theme but want to make a few tweaks you don't have to hack around in the theme itself: just create a sub-theme, make the tweaks there and you're done.