Drupal, my blog, Views, and the grand experiment

Lately I've been getting more and more unhappy with blogging under Drupal. Specifically, I'm developing a serious dislike (bordering on hate) for the blog module that ships with Drupal. Regular visitors to this site, CookingWithLinux.com, and my new occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show, WFTL Bytes!, have already figured out that I'm experimenting with new topics, new content, and new ways of delivering that content. Aside from the sites and content I've mentioned, I want to start talking and writing about other things that excite me, whether it be Linux, science, politics, or religion. What I thought I wanted was a blog with sub-blogs so I could focus each of my blogs on a particular topic and let you, the reader, choose the topics that interested you. What I achieved was more confusion and the beginnings of a grand experiment to do away with the blog module entirely.

My own personal site now has several hundred documents in it. It would, in fact, have hundreds more had I not decided to break some of that content out into other sites. CookingWithLinux.com is meant to focus primarily on my Cooking With Linux column, which appears monthly in the Linux Journal, and which I've been writing for nearly ten years. Because CWL has such a huge following and people seem to love the idea of being part of it, I opened it up to readers (and members of my WFTL LUG to create their own content as well as share wine reviews (along with my own occasional tasting reports). WFTL Bytes! is a video news show that covers the Linux and FOSS news scene with a little humor and a little attitude. Nothing more complicated.

So far so good, but my own blog was still a mess. Then I discovered what I thought was the answer, a Drupal module called Everyblog. Everyblog made it possible to create multiple blogs under a single user, create blogs named whatever you chose -- as opposed to Drupal's core blog module which calls each blog "userid's blog". So I installed everyblog, went to the trouble of converting a few hundred blog entries to Everyblog, including those of a few occasional non-me bloggers on my site, dealt with the issues (there were a few), then sat back and started to get happy.

Then Everyblog was shut down by the Drupal team for (apparently) bad programming and failure to follow security rules for module creation. "Project not supported: This project is no longer supported, and is no longer available for download. Disabling everything included by this project is strongly recommended!" Damn! The quoted message appeared in the update status from my site's admin page. As you can see, they strongly recommended that I uninstall Everyblog. Damn again! A lot of work went into converting these entries -- at least the content is still out there.

Which brings me to the Views module. Views is, apparently, the most popular add-on module in the Drupal universe, capable of doing everything Drupal doesn't already do including live video chat over a subspace link. Okay, I may be exaggerating slightly, but every indication so far is that I should be able to simply create normal story nodes, assign tags as I see fit, and create views to display my individual blogs in different ways, highlight and sort content as I desire, and provide easy ways to navigate blog content.

This is the beginning of the experiment. I have not yet done anything with views, but this blog post is created as a standard story node. I am assigning tags that make sense to it, which hopefully will fit in with my view definitions (once I have created them). I'll get my custom Linux blog, my WFTL Bytes! blog, my CookingWithLinux blog, my politics blog, my religion blog, my . . . well you get the idea, and I'll get them all looking and behaving in the most wonderful bloggy way possible.

I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, if you are a Drupal type and you want to offer advice or shout, "You fool! You're doing it all wrong! You should be doing this instead (with a description)" then by all means, leave me a comment.

-- Marcel