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Drupal 6 to 7 Upgrade

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On a whim last night, I decided to see what it would take to upgrade from Drupal 6 to 7. Turns out, not as much as I thought. The biggest problem was finding a new theme, since my previous theme is no longer supported. So welcome to the new blog.

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Drupal Upgrade

Submitted by on

I have upgraded the site from 4.5.8 to 5.1. Really I just had 2 hours in the middle of the night to kill, so why not do a blog upgrade, right? I suppose I should have been sleeping.

The main reason for the upgrade was to install a captcha module to combat the increasing amount of comment spam I've been seeing. It's just annoying to have to delete comments every day. Well, Drupal doesn't have a captcha module built-in so the upgrade wasn't strictly necessary, but I was a few revisions behind so I figured why not.

There are a few things that have changed and I'll have to work on it further, like the missing post category menu from the left. And the archives disappeared. Definitely not cool. But it's late and I need some sleep. Some other time then. Please let me know if you find anything else broken though.

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Read-only Comments

Submitted by on

I get the infrequent comment spam posted to the site. Actually, I added the "Recent comments" box to the left side of the sight specifically so I could monitor the situation. Plus I enjoy reading what you guys have to say. In an attempt to limit the former without unnecessarily burdening the latter I have written a crontab to update all my blog posts to set comments to read-only after 4 months. I hope that's enough time for feedback from everybody. Let me know if you feel otherwise.

For the curious, here's the script:

#!/bin/sh

echo "update node set comment = '1' where comment = '2' and unix_timestamp(now()) > changed and unix_timestamp(now()) - changed > 10368000 order by from_unixtime(changed);" | mysql -u comments -ppassword blog

And I created a special user just for this task:

mysql> grant update,select on blog.node to comments@localhost identified by 'password';

And added it to the system crontab:

15 2 * * * nobody /usr/local/bin/disable-comments.sh

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Site upgrade

Submitted by on

I've upgraded the site to drupal 4.5 and migrated it to a new server. Hopefully this will be a good move in the long run. For now it will help me save $25 when my hosting company tries to charge my Visa card and discovers that it's expired. I'm sure they'll cancel my account at some point.



It also represents a shift in goals for the site. I tried before to just write technical articles that could help mankind. That was all well and good, but they were few and far between. It just takes quite a while to write articles like that.



So, while I plan to author technical articles from time to time, I plan to toss in personal notes and more simple comments.

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