What's going on
Posted April 1st, 2007 by Administrator
Here we will discuss the state of the website.
Loud Music. Cheap Food. Bad Movies.
Here we will discuss the state of the website.
OK this is the last new feature for the week, I promise
I couldn’t help myself, I added the ability for Contributors to attach videos from places like YouTube to their stories and columns. So, when you review a movie you can embed the trailer at the end of your post for all to see. See an example. Nifty.
– The Management
Awesome new features
I have rolled out a bunch of new features which I describe at length in my blog post, The Birth of Gogoray. Enjoy!
– The Management
More pathauto fun
Hey there, it’s Suzanne the Administrator again, letting you all know that I installed a new version of pathauto, which once again changed its handling of punctuation. I deleted and re-created all the aliases, so there’s a possibility some might not work. The biggest change was that before, the “.” and “_” characters in usernames were automatically changed into a “-“; now they are filtered out completely, unless I make a setting to replace the period and underscore with a hyphen, including in post titles, where those characters were stripped before. So the behavior is different, and not entirely to my liking. Moral of the story - be careful of using punctuation in your post titles, or try to avoid it altogether, at least for now.
– The Management
New notify module; also, problems with pathauto
I installed a notifications module that lets users select if they want to get a daily-digest style text email whenever new content or comments are posted. Enable it for yourself by logging into gogoray.net, selecting “My Account”, and clicking the “My notification settings” tab.
We’ve been having problems with pathauto, the module that automagically creates friendly urls for our blog entries, articles, and whatnot. The issue is punctuation - it used to get filtered out, but now that some new features have been added, the behavior is different and not very friendly anymore. Therefore, I just went in and hacked a bit, then re-created all the paths. As a result, you might find a bunch of links not working on the site. All apologies. This will also probably take our search engine ranking way down. Oh well. In the meanwhile, I’m letting contributors and editors modify the URL aliases to their liking since they don’t really need to have the whole title in them to be useful. Again, sorry if a bunch of links are broken, hopefully we will get to a better state soon. I make no guarantees as to what the permanent link will be at this point, but you can always search for stuff in the box on all pages of our site. Good luck.
– The Management
Welcome, Huddled Masses!
Anonymous visitors can now make comments, or become registered users without any sort of administrative approval. In other words, let’s get this party started!
I have installed a CAPTCHA module on gogoray. This means we can determine if a visitor is actually a spam bot, and prevent it from creating bogus user accounts or posting junk comments. I have setup a few CAPTCHA points at user registration, comment post, and user contact forms using different methods such as recognizing characters in an image, solving a simple arithmetic problem, or choosing the right word of a random phrase. Hopefully this all works as expected, but if not please go ahead and contact me on the site contact form, which doesn’t have any CAPTCHA.
Oh, and I also upgraded to Drupal 5.2 for some security fixes, and updated our modules to the latest versions. Drupal 6.0 is expected out in September, but I’m not holding my breath. When it does arrive, we should be able to transition over no problem since I hardly have any extraneous modules enabled; we’re running pretty bare bones here, folks. However, I would like to add some new features when the time comes, such as better media content management, and whatever else the community needs. If you have some time, check out Drupal’s modules for anything that we should try out.
– The Management
Here's Johnny
Well here’s the spanking-new theme. I’m trying to achieve that all-important balance between usability and style. As always, if there’s a problem, please let me know about it.
– The Management
I am still setting it up
It has taken me a long while, but I think I finally figured out how to structure the website using Drupal Taxonomies, which is a very complicated name for something really simple: categories. There are multiple content types, but some of them, stories and column entries, we want to break down into sections about music, movies, politics, or other distractions. Furthermore, column entries need to be categorized by which column they are in. I didn’t want to turn the blogs into columns, because sometimes people just want to write journal entries and that’s what a blog is for. Also, there might be a guest contributor for a column, so I didn’t want to restrict a column to a certain user. Maybe this all sounds like gobbledygook still, but I need to lay out somewhere.
– The Management