WordPress to Drupal: Learning about updates

Not much has changed but I learned a lot by making the changes. The most visible changes are "Forums" are now known as "Articles" and I have established a set of article topics. I also added a couple of fixed pages from my old blog. These eventually need to come over and are easy to move by just doing an x-copy of the text on my blog and pasting the text into Drupal's page input form. There are no links, pictures or other complications.

After preparing these changes on my development system I tarred up my Drupal development directory, copied the file to my external server, unpacked the archive, moved the symbolic link so that http://davenjudy.org/drupal now pointed to the most recent version and then looked for my changes only to find that they weren't there. I then compared the file sizes from my initial deployment to today's and saw that the file sizes were identical. I then went back to my development system and dumped the database using mysqldump and went through the process of copying and restoring the database from my development machine to my external server.

This time my changes appeared as expected. Unfortunately, this means that I won't have a convenient way to leave old copies of the development around since there is only one database. I will go back and correct the earlier articles to indicate that there won't be a good way to see the site's evolution although I will have the database snapshots available and may eventually look into providing these snapshots if there is sufficient interest.

I like the look of the site (so far). I'm not sure whether the things I don't like are inherent in Drupal or just the Theme I'm using. I don't like the way Drupal's "seconday links" (which are how to navigate to my fixed pages) also show up as tabbed menu items above the main content area. Also, the primary links showed up as tabs across the top of the content area (above the site name) when I tried using those as links to the Article topics. Looks like I need to figure out how to turn these off so I need to do more reading.

Finally, I turned off Drupal's "blog" capability. It was sticking whatever new content I created (i.e., the static pages) in the main content area. This may be fine for a traditional blog but not at all what I want. The forums seem to work with no problems without the blog turned on.

Now that the Drupal site is alive, I'm surprised someone hasn't been stupid enough to post some spam to it. I'm pretty sure the method I'm using for replicating my changes (mysqldump) will trash any content. Something else to look into since I expect to be making tweaks to the site for a while.

Cheers,
Dave