Andy Chase

I’ve finally started getting my hands dirty with Drupal over the last couple of weeks, going through the process of actually building a site versus adding a couple of pages and menu links here and there to see how it works, and now poking around under the hood to learn how to extend it.

Adding a bunch of pages in a row using the standard interface is usually a pain in any CMS, and Drupal is no exception: Click to expand all of the option fields, click through another screen to attach the new page to a menu, try and remember the weight of the last item you added, repeat.

Half the problem when trying to learn a new language or platform on your own is finding a practical application for it. You never get very far with “Hello, World”.

I’m really surprised there are no Drupal modules out there facilitating the import of existing content and/or menu structures. At least, none that I have been able to find other than the excellent WordPress Migration Utility . I used that to move the last 5 1/2 years’ worth of blog entries over to Drupal.

So, there’s my first practical application: a module that imports either a page hierarchy, creating a menu and stub Page nodes, or possibly even importing actual content.

I’m not sure what the import format will be. The smart way to develop this would be to make the import tool pluggable, so other people could write drivers to import whatever format they need. I think that’s overly ambitious for the first version of this plugin, but I’m beginning to get a sense of how that could be accomplished without too much trouble in Drupal.

31 January, 2009 It took me a while, but I did ultimately build just such a module. It’s in the Drupal contributions repository, and it’s called Bones.

When digging around for Drupal Forms API examples make sure you know which version of Drupal the examples you find are for; the differences between 4.x and 5.x are just subtle enough so as to be terribly confusing.

Finally, I found this discussion thread. For a clear, functional example see the second comment down by pwolanin, “Wrong code above, and 2nd point: form_id”. The code works, and the explanation of how the form_id is named is tremendously helpful:

http://drupal.org/node/119117

Sam Adams Honey Porter is back, at least for the time being, and I am pleasantly surprised to find that I like it just about as well as I did 10 or 11 years ago, which was probably the last time I had it.

I remember usually having a six pack of Samuel Adams’ Honey Porter or Scotch Ale in the fridge of my Racquet Club apartment, but after moving to L.A. I think I was either too poor to buy Sam Adams for a while, or too busy trying out other beers. By the time I got a hankering for Honey Porter again, they had stopped making it.

Late last year I heard that it was available again, but only in one of their variety 12 packs. I was pleasantly surprised to see a six pack of it last week, and today I finally gave in to temptation.

It’s not the best porter I’ve ever had —that honor would have to go to a bottle of Samuel Smith’s Tadcaster I had at Bishop’s Lounge about three years ago— but it’s good, and the nostalgia factor counts for a lot in my book.

Here’s hoping they start selling Scotch Ale by the six pack again.