Drupal social publishing software

There's a rather well used Chinese proverb that says if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day but if you teach him to fish you feed him for a lifetime. I've recently been doing the Drupal version of this. It is one thing to help folks, especially those new to the community by providing patches to solve their itches. But it is entirely better if you teach them how to create patches and they post patches themselves. Perhaps with Drupalcon starting we should have a goal of creating at least 100 new patch submitters. Best of all it's very easy to teach because there's a very good handbook page on creating patches.

Reading through RSS this morning I'd been meaning to post that Drupalcon is close to filling up. Well I missed the window. Drupalcon 08 is sold out with 800 attendees. It will be my first Drupalcon so I won't have the past conferences to compare to but I'm sure it will be wonderful.

Recently I've been helping a few folks convert websites from WordPress to Drupal. Presently this works for migrating to Drupal 5 so if you want a Drupal 6 site first migrate to Drupal 5 and then upgrade the site to Drupal 6.

There are a couple of different ways of approaching this task. In the distant past I've worked with wp2drupal. Those experiences are a distant enough memory that I can't speak to it one way or another. It does seem that it has been a while since that module was upgraded. On the other hand Wordpress Import is undergoing active development. One user I worked with in IRC was struggling with wp2drupal and found Wordpress Import to be very simple. Also a note that the Wordpress Import module has been updated since I've used it so some of the steps may not be necessary.

The process really couldn't be simpler. Start with an WordPress export of an extendedRSS file. With this in hand you'll need a Drupal site setup. The site can either be new or an existing site but these hints apply to using a new site. The import process is very simple you select the extendedRSS file and tell Drupal which WordPress users map to which Drupal users. With that done the data now resides in the Drupal database. Things are pretty good but there are a few tweaks that make things better. The creation time for the items has been set to the creation time from WordPress. However, the updated time is set to the time of the import. This really matters most if you have search enabled on your site. Search results show the time changed in the display.

The wonderful Drupal AsSense module received a great new update tonight. Ironically one of the notes I made on the plane was to look into whether a universal patch for hiding the currently selected AdSense ID from the user profile made sense. It probably wouldn't have made much sense. Instead I came home to find out that the AdSense module now has a great API and modules can do all sorts of things. In addition there are a plethora of options for integrating with UserPoints, setting ID's by content type or taxonomy terms. All and all an outstanding piece of work.

According to the post the download will be here. Upgrading is pretty straight forward. Remove your old AsSense module and install the new one. A visit to the admin/build/modules page will reveal that you need to enable one of the two included modules, either basic or revenue-sharing.

I've been working recently on a presentation about open source software. This great upgrade will be included as a prime example of where open source and the community behind projects like Drupal make software better than many a closed-source shop.