learnandteachonline.com

I'm missing a table.

Seeing if this post shows up with comments on.

I'm going to try upgrading Drupal tonight and see if I can get comments re-enabled here.

Drupal categories are more than just categories with the introduction of the taxomony module in 4.7.

But first I need to learn how to turn them on so you can see them. Upgrades. Re-learning stuff. Hmmpf.

Probably it was silly of me to upgrade again to the beta, but there was something I wanted to try.

There's a bug in the comments and I'm going to have to wait. Can't use the patch utility because I don't have shell access. I miss having that. I guess I'll disable comments for the time being. No sense in teasing about it.

Drupal user-to-user help is great. Lots of users means lots of the same questions and answers. Since I've been using the tool in November, every question I've wanted answered has been available in the support forum archives.

F'rinstance, tonight I needed to change the year field for archive dates. I didn't need help with the code so much as I just didn't know where to find the file I needed to change, you know how that goes?

From the moment I typed in drupal.org until I found my answer was -- seriously -- about 45 seconds. Can't beat it.

I still like Drupal -- don't get me wrong. It's just that I'm not used to so many features being optional. Like, Friday night I realized I hadn't approved a bunch of comments. I suppose I expected I'd hear in e-mail that comments had been submitted.

When I went to look for how to turn on that feature, I learned that it's a separate module. I've used open source, community-developed LAMP apps before where it took a while to intergrate contributed add-ons. But, I don't know. Doesn't notification seem like kind of a basic thing? It's kind of ordering a new car (does anybody do that anymore?) and finding out the windshield wipers are optional.

Hopefully it won't be too hard to install.

Later... See my talking-to-myself comments. It was. Hard. Well, harder than it should have to be.

What an idiot I am. I suppose I thought that because any other blog I've ever published sent me email notifications when someone came along to comment, that Drupal would do that too without my having to ask it to.

I just approved everything except the spam, and changed a few settings:

- Disallowed a comment subject line because they were not getting output anyway

- Changed setting from you can't give your contact info if you post anonymously to you must give it

- Put the comment form at the bottom of the individual post page

I'll try to go through and reply to everybody, though they've all probably lost interest by now. I heard from the TMBG podcast producer, Amy Gahran, Jason Calacanis, my OPML buddy Wilk and some interersting unnamed commenters. Darn!

I should put something in my sidebar about how to subscribe to a category of posts. Drupal makes it so easy. It's really cool. Say you didn't want to follow my occasional mutterings about my kids or movies I like. If you're only interested in what I have to say about podcasting, you can click on the word "podcasting" at the end of any post I've assigned to that category.

In the case of podcasting you'll get five pages worth of posts since October about podcasting. At the bottom of the page the plain orange square is a link to the RSS feed for just the podcasting category. If you subscribe to that feed, all you'll get are my future posts about podcasting.

Isn't that neat?

This is a nice add-on to Drupal. The AdSense module, among other things, allows you to serve ads to guests but registered users don't see them.

I still haven't dug into Drupal modules. I'm afraid I'll get lost in there -- not lost in an "I don't know what to do" way, lost in a "where did the last nine hours go" way.

Found an informal group working on developing education modules for Drupal. Quizzes, even SCORM. It will be a good thing to follow. I'll add the feed to my public aggregator for a while and see what we get.