Tom Geller Communications

You might know of Certified to Rock, which reduces your activity on drupal.org to a single number, much as a long simmer reduces gourmet food to a carbonaceous layer that ruins the frying pan, and I really liked that pan!

Anyway, the problem with CTR is that it only measures how great you are, and some of us don’t take praise well. For we Drupalists of low self-esteem, now there’s Certified to SUCK! Here’s how it works.

• Go to certifiedtosuck.com
• enter your drupal.org username
• click the button
• wait for the meter to do some corny sprite-based animation
• see your score
• check out the scores of Drupalists you know
• get angry that they have better scores than you
• check your own score again, as if it’ll be different
• write a long post about how bogus the whole thing is and about how people can’t be reduced to numbers, man.

Scores on CTS are calculated by… oh, never mind, it’s long and boring. The important thing is that it works and Must Be Obeyed. Void, like many things, in Idaho.

Hug me.

I’ve been watching Drupal 7 for almost two years now and have been champing at the bit to start using it. I launched the promotional site for “Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide” in Drupal 7 — how could I not? — about a month before Drupal 7’s official release. Now I’ve also taken the opportunity to combine tomgeller.com and gellerguides.com (my portfolio site) into one. The new one is at tomgeller.com, of course; for the moment you can still see the old version (with comments closed) at http://temp.tgeller.com.

The upgrade itself wasn’t so bad, although I ran into more error messages than I expected. But merging the two sites was frankly harder than I expected. There are basically three options for transporting nodes:

• Feeds: This is my favorite tool except for two things: There’s no way to bring over node comments in D7 (yet!), and I was stymied for hours until I realized that it demands Unix-style line endings. (On the Mac you can force those in the Save dialog box of TextWrangler.)
• Node Export: Again, no way to bring in comments, but otherwise handy. Despite its name, it handles both exporting and importing — which is good, because there’s still no D7 version of Node Import.
• Migrate: Requires substantial custom programming, and is therefore a non-starter for me. People who can use it say it’s great, though.

I mention these options — and a lot more — in the paper I wrote for Acquia, “Migrating a Web Site to Drupal”. (That link takes you to one of my Panels– and Quick Tabs-based portfolio pages, which I’m very proud of.)

Beyond node migration, there were other surprises. For example, messages that Drupal automatically sends to users — to confirm their membership, for example — use old-style tokens like !username instead of [user:name], and have to be changed manually. I missed a theming change that threw some baffling errors, and had to drop some functionality because the modules weren’t ready. Then the statistics table stubbornly refused to update properly — until I moved the site to its host.

So what’s the prognosis? I agree with TimOnWeb.com that your situation dictates whether to upgrade to (or build anew on) Drupal 7. The “7.0” label is psychologically powerful, and I made the mistake of believing that its “release” meant that major problems had all disappeared. They haven’t; there’s still a lot of work to be done. (Speaking of which, please continue to support developers who are working on 7.x projects!)

Having said all that: The proof is in the pudding. tomgeller.com is up and running on Drupal 7, with a hell of a lot of functionality I’d been withholding while on Drupal 6. Enjoy this forward-looking time for all its worth.