I Has a Drupal Happy

Today, after a longer time than anyone would have ever thought necessary, I finally took our site upgrade to Drupal 6 live. (Just in time to start planning for 7...) It was an illuminating process, not least of which was learning what password exactly was set for the mysqladmin account (it wasn't any of the ones I thought, and I lost A MONTH over this little wee tiny datum. I can't tell you how gosh-darned smart that made me feel.) Thanks to the patience and digging of my Drupal guru, we got everything migrated and updated and transferred over. Then I - through the power of CSS! - fixed the dramatically-changed template back to the basic layout my staff knows and loves. (That made me feel a bit smarter.)

I am thoroughly pleased with the new functionality in the D6 versions of my modules; I swapped editors to FCKeditor and love it; I'm no longer quite as trepidacious about Views; my image galleries now look nice and streamlined; and my users can now even upload files to the server! (Doesn't mean they will, but at least now they can.)

I am a happy, happy person. (Cary, you rock.)

And now, a moment of squee

So, I was browsing a list of what sites are being run with Drupal. I knew The Onion was a Drupal site, but was very surprised to find out that Warner Bros, Nike, FedEx, and a whole huge heaping pile of others were too. Very cool!

Should we ever have more than a dozen users at a time, at least I know the CMS I chose can handle it :-D

Literary Tattoos and the LSW

OK, not together... well, not yet, at least... but I wanted to mention them both today!

• Literary Tattoos, Books category. A lot of patience went into some of these inscriptions... reminds me of the Skin Project, "a story published on the skin of 2095 volunteers."
• Hey! The Library Society of the World now has a website, in addition to the wiki! (Bonus: it's in Drupal.)
  

Speaking of Drupal... things are going swimmingly. I couldn't be happier! I'll actually be embarking on a new Drupal installation in the coming weeks, this time implementing web-based forms (a whole new module set to investigate!). I'll, no doubt, whine about the whole thing here :-D

It's only 96° so far today, with a 30% chance of rain (and 30% Rh; just enough to feel sticky.)

Random Musings: Friday Edition

Just wanted to share some tidbits from the week, from all over the tag map:

* My Drupal site is now live. Finally. *wibble*

* "Bikes, books and busting stereotypes," over at the Gloucester Advocate, is a great article about the Biblio Turismo tour and the folks behind it. What a neat idea!

* As an astronomy geek, Tag Galaxy is just - well, it's just darned spiffy. What a nifty cool groovy way to search Flickr images.

* Real Job Titles for Library and Information Science Professionals. Well, the title sums it up pretty well. If your job title isn't here, contact Michelle and she'll add it!

* As a gamer geek married to a World of Warcraft addict, the fact that a Librarian Guild has formed in WoW just makes me feel, well, all warm and fuzzy.

Weather update: hello again, triple digits! Today they're saying a high of 99°, but I think that's just to line up with the forecasts of 100° Saturday, 101° Sunday, and 102° Monday. Who knew the forecasters were funny this way?

Monday tidbits

Just some random bits to share:

* The new Indiana Jones movie has a hilarious scene in a library (well, I thought it was hilarious) involving a motorcycle and a reference question.

* From Playing for Keeps, by Jane Waterhouse: "Kitty Katz, everyone's idea of a librarian---each angular, beige part of her neatly tied with pearly ropes from which hung glasses, cardigan sweaters, even keys." (p.231) As Pat (who sent it to me) says, "I don't feel beige..."

* My Drupal site goes live (finally!) in the next 24 hours. *wibble*

Back to the nervous triple-checking, and closing my window; it's already 86° heading for 102°.

More Made of Win

If I can keep knocking out the small-yet-annoyingly-frustrating issues like this, I'll be golden!

Today I figured out the display ordering rationale in the image gallery module. It's such an easy module to use that I didn't want to discard it in favor of custom-built views for every single gallery every time one was created or modified, or (and I admit it) learn how to modify the php template, but not being able to display the images in the order I wished - or use a specific thumbnail to identify a gallery - was really getting on my nerves. So today I played around with a test gallery, tested file name, title, etc etc - and finally realized it sorts in an absolute, last-in-first-out order. Now that I know that, I can work around it; I just have to remember it down the line. As usual, it's a very small thing that was causing my much larger frustrations... but now I've gone into all my galleries, rearranged them to the engineers' satisfaction, and it's all good. Hurrah!

I've also taken the "oh, boy, here we go" step of sending a final review statement out to all the staff. We are, finally, approaching the last step before going public with this and being done with this task! Woo hoo!

79° and sunny. :-D

Today: Made of Win

Today has been a pretty good day.

1) After battling the front page display of my new web site for a while, I threw it out to a local CSS expert (thanks, Mark!) and to the Drupal4Lib community. (I wanted dual background images, one at the upper left and one at the bottom right, and no matter what I did the front_page module was only showing one image.) I got a lot of great suggestions to fidget with things and arrangements, which led me to think about swapping which images were called from where. When I flipped the body and wrapper background images, it worked! Not only did it work, it works across every browser I've tested so far, even IE (!!!!), and under both Windows and Linux. (I'll test from the Mac when I get home, but I expect it'll be fine.) Needless to say, a happy dance was performed :-D

2) I got to play with javascript and replaced the static image on our main web page with a script that randomly displays one of eleven images. Makes me happy, and more importantly, it seems to have made the scientists and directorate happy. Thanks, JavaScript Source!

3) I get to shop for all the table decorations for the big "Under the Sea" party at SLA. Hee hee!

Currently 84° and sunny. (expect to see that a lot in the future, ha ha)

AL Direct notices me again!

My CMS article is mentioned in this week's AL Direct! How cool; even though I can't swing being a member of ALA as well as SLA, they still seem to like me! :-) (Thanks to Joe for letting me know!)

CiL: I made the cover!

Wow. I had no idea that Information Today was going to use my article on choosing and implementing a CMS for their March cover! How exciting :-D Even more exciting, they've made it freely available online (although without the groovy graphics and tables and things). This makes my second article for CiL, and my second cover! What a lovely way to end a Monday!

It's a perfectly lovely 75°. Aaahhhh.... spring in Tucson!

Slog, Slog, Slogging Along

You may have noticed (then again, maybe not) that things have been somewhat quieter than usual around here lately. I'm continuing to slog through the new Drupal-based web site; am now nagging others for input to the image galleries (why post old images to a new web site?) and waiting on that, and the other big bugaboo is: the front page module.

You'd think, after reading the project page, that it'd be pretty straightforward. And for the uses I've done so far - basically, a link to log in, and a link to the sitemap for browsing - it was fine. But now I want to put an actual spiffy front page with a different look to it on the site, and danged if I'm not having a ton of trouble with it. The front page settings has a nice little box for you to use, and you can choose themed, full, or a redirect type. I've been using themed, which uses my theme from the rest of the site, but now I want to choose full and drop in a completely different page. I quote: "You can paste in the full HTML code for a complete page and include a different style sheet in the HEAD of the document if you want a completely different layout and style to the rest of your site." So, I do that, but does it work? NO. It basically seems to be taking my title and any other information in the head of the document (including the style sheet), stripping it down to plain text, and dropping it before any of my content. This leads to: a VERY UGLY PAGE.

I've had it for the day. Maybe whatever I'm missing will become clear next week...after a lot more coffee. Sigh.

LoginToboggan Rocks!

So, I've been fairly quiet lately about the whole Drupal development thing, primarily because I've been madly pulling in data and creating node after node after node. It's really shaping up nicely. One of the big bugaboos I've mentioned here before was the access restrictions; was having a very hard time getting that all sorted out the way I wanted. Well, I threw a help email out to the Drupal4Lib listserv and bang, I got a good half-dozen suggestions. One of them, LoginToboggan, is exactly what I was looking for! (The folks on Drupal4Lib rock, I tell you.)

It's gonna be close but I think I'll make the end-of-February goal for going live with the new site. The public parts of the site are 95% done; the private sections are about 80% but I feel fine going live with some of the older historical data not quite posted yet (provided, of course, I get it posted within a month). The next big thing facing me is the actual migration; I have a sparkly new server waiting for everything, but all I've done so far is make sure the latest version of CentOS is installed and everything's updated. I haven't even installed Drupal there yet... bleurgh. But I have, what, ten days left? I can do this!!

It's a blissful, sunny 72° and a lovely breeze is coming in my open window.

ALA Goes Drupal

Sayeth Jenny Levine: "ALA is planning to move its current Online Communities service to a Drupal environment during the next few months, so we've posted an RFP for the project at http://blogs.ala.org/ittsupdate.php . Please help us publicize this to relevant groups so that we get as many responses as possible." Interested? Read more at the ITTS Update.

Drupal pause, EDMS head-bashing

So. After such a flurry of happiness with my Drupal problems, I was cheerfully buzzing along getting all my missing documentation uploaded and linked in, and somewhat avoiding the issue of our EDMS. I finally got the go-ahead for reimplementation from our Big Boss but I knew it was gonna be a huge pain, so I postponed, and postponed... until I can't anymore, not really.

So (sigh) I'm putting Drupal on the back burner until the new year. It's fascinating and I'm getting a total kick out of it, but it's not mission-critical the way getting the staff back into the EDMS is. So a few days ago I started spending all my time working on the EDMS, with some good and some bad moments.

The biggest bad moment - and I guess all things considered it's not "bad", just "really really annoying" - is that there's a bug in the export system. So when I exported the workflow, user and group lists, cards, etc etc, it turns out that none of the passwords, permissions, notifications, etc were captured and brought over. Which means - yes, boys and girls, what fun! - that I have to do it ALL OVER AGAIN. So far I'm a day and a half into it and only a third through the workflow. (A bit of history: this is a setup that took over a year to get worked out and in place, so having to recreate all the "who gets notified when what happens" and "who has to approve what for the next step" all at once is not a fun task.)

After I get all this sorted out, then it's client install time, and then the next fun part that's gonna take a lot of time: migrating all the files out of our shared file server and back into the EDMS. On the up side, almost all the staff starts their holiday vacations next week, so if I can get through most of this this week, next week there'll be hardly anyone to inconvenience with file moves - fingers crossed.

All this is a rather long-winded explanation (whine?) about why you won't be seeing any Drupal entries here for a little while. I'll post any librarian image things I come across, but everyone seems to be being rather quiet these days - I haven't seen anything come across in a while now! (If you've seen something, please forward it on to me... thanks)!

It's been raining for five days now, on and off, and it's been make-me-whine cold. ('Course, that doesn't take much, as I pull out sweaters if it drops below 70°...) But the rain is good, and needed, and it's a soft rain that hasn't caused too much flooding, which is a nice change from the summer monsoons. And hey, it's not an ice storm, so yay for that.

Happiness!

Thanks to the Drupal Dude, who came through again with flying colors, I got the upload directory schema sorted out, have tarred-and-transferred all my documents, and have just spent the last hour cheerfully linking documents into the existing nodes on the new site. Cross that puppy off the list! w00t!

What I did wrong in the IMCE settings is this: I missed that it's all relative to the main directory "files". By setting "files" again as a shared directory for authenticated users, with subdirectories of blah blah blah, the system was going "Oh, you want that for each authenticated user". Turns out if you put "/" into the shared directory setting and leave all the rest blank, voila, now the proper directories are visible, navigable, and the files in them are linkable, to all authenticated users. Hurrah!

Sadly, I must restrict myself now - half a day on Drupal, half a day on reimplementing our EDMS. I wanna keep cranking on the Drupal pages - linking in documents is a good half of what's left to do, and I'd love to be able to mark those pages as finished! But, all in good time...

It's a lovely sunny 70°. Wish I could send some of this to either coast - have family on both sides that're getting smashed by Mother Nature right now.

Please excuse me whilst I bang my head on the wall.

So. I've been wrestling with Drupal again for a few days (this is a spillover post from last week) and I think, like time-zones, I may have some kind of weird internal block about this. Arrgh! I have been trying to tweak the IMCE module to manage non-image files, so that I can get my hundreds of various PDF and PPT files (for the project documentation and meeting materials, respectively) linked into my ever-increasing list of completely ingested pages. Every time I tweak it, it does something new and unexpected, and I can't figure out why. For example, I want sub-folders called "docs", "images", and "logos" in the main shared folder called "files". I now have those three sub-folders in a new shared sub-folder called "files" (as in, it's now files/files/docs ) - which is not what I wanted. If I take out the "files" identified in the IMCE settings page for the shared folder, I then got the three sub-folders under a new folder 2 (my userid). Also not what I wanted. So now I have random folders everywhere except where I want them, and for some reason I can't comprehend, when I'm logged in as admin I can only see the files/u1 folder and not any other folder. (When logged in as myself, I can browse around all these empty folders, so that's a small positive.) Sigh.

I did successfully install the nodeaccess module, and think it'll be very handy for managing access to various bits and pieces of the site - but it still requires some work in the roles arena (such as, properly defining roles and then access permissions for those roles) that, again like the time-zones, I just can't get my head around. Then again, a new staff userID I created successfully blocked access to the selected page, so again, a small positive. (It didn't ask for a login, though.) Sigh.

The poor Drupal Dude is set up for a webcon with me tomorrow morning, to try and work me through these problems I keep having. I hope I don't blow all my remaining contract time with him just on these - I have so many more things to wrestle with. SIGH.

When I finally get a grip on all this stuff (because DAMMIT I will argh grrr) it'll totally be worth it. But, dang, some days I wish we'd just hired someone to do this all for me...! (The PM would never have gone for it but I can dream.)

The sun is setting (yes, really!) and it's 64°. Glad I kept my coat at lunch!

LISNews for teh win!

Congratulations to Blake on his successful (still ongoing but lookin' good) migration of LISNews to Drupal! (w00t!)

Aah, fall in the desert... currently 88° and sunny. I hear there was snow in the Northeast.

Slides on SlideShare

So, I created a SlideShare account and uploaded my (admittedly not very descriptive) slides from my Internet Librarian presentation. I was very impressed with how easy it was to use; now if only I could get a microphone so I could turn it into a slidecast and do the descriptive part!

| View | Upload your own

IL2007: Content Management Systems

I kicked off this section with a brief overview of our year-long investigation into content management systems (CMSs), then passed it off to Amy Radermacher (Concordia University) and May Chang (University of Maryland) to discuss their own experiences with the CMSs chosen for them by their universities. I have to say I felt pretty lucky after hearing what they've had to go through...

Anyway, I'm going to learn how to use SlideShare and post my slides later today; in the meantime, thanks to ellbeecee for the action photos!

IL2007: DIY Intranet

Eleni Gogas and Donna Feddern, Escondido Public Library

Part I: how to set up an intranet using a wiki

previously used a shared network drive

Why a wiki instead of a 1.0 website?
- really want staff to participate
- informal
- easier to use and find info

Pre-Wiki
- Picking a wiki: what did they need?
- wysiwyg
- easy to set up, easy to learn, easy to teach

they went with Jotspot but there are issues since its acquisition by Google

wiki farm options

Wiki Setup
- screenshots of different pages
- implementors needed to really slow down to teach the novice users

Training now in process
- Showing off wiki to all staff, give tours
- Train supervisors
- Overcome technophobia in staff
- Let them play!

Future phase: implementation
- Define go-to folks
- Guidelines
- Keep reminding and training staff
- Ongoing process

Issues & Troubleshooting
- Bugs in free wiki software
- Backups
- Fear of change
- Staff interest

Cool tools to try
- Spice up the wiki a bit - widgets, slideshows, etc

Part II: Examples of how they're using it and the impacts of implementing a site-wide intranet

Digging Out

Hello, sports fans... no, wait...

So I've been buried in engineering documentation manuals and standards (hello, ANSI/ASME Y14.35M!) for the past week or so. Interesting stuff (well, I think so, at least!) - it's good to know that what I've set up for us so far is pretty much within existing standards, although I have a lot of definitions to add to my existing specification document. (I'm learning that whenever possible, include a definition of your "thing" in your specification so that there are fewer questions about what you mean. Doesn't mean there won't be questions, there'll just be fewer of them.) Now that I've been through most of them (although I still have "Engineering Documentation Control Practices and Procedures" to work through) it's time to digest... and come up for air!

I was able to get back on the Drupal work today - spent all afternoon on it - and I feel quite satisfied with the way it's coming together. Yay! (My wrists wish there was a way to autoingest content, but alas, there is not...)

Tomorrow: Configuration Management Joy. Four change requests were finally approved at a meeting today (one of them has taken over a year to work through the process) and now I have to implement the changes across our documentation control processes. Wheee.....

It's 94° and the sun is headed for the horizon... aah, Fall.