Notes on the Site Upgrade

This weekend I upgraded piggington.com to use the latest version of Drupal, an open source content management system that is very powerful but, unfortunately, not very easy to upgrade. (Which explains why I let myself get two major releases behind).

The performance of the site should be improved, but much more for authenticated users than anonymous users, as the prior version had only cached content for anonymous users. Additional performance improvements will be made later this week as a kindly expert pigg has offered to help me optimize my database and web server configuration. In the meantime, hopefully the Drupal upgrade is a good first step.

This upgrade comes with some new features — I am probably forgetting some but here is at least a partial list:

• Subscription functionality is vastly improved. You can subscribe to be notified by email when content is updated or commented on, as before, but now you can specify subscriptions to users, content types, and categories in addition to individual threads. Unfortunately to make this work I had to blow the prior subscription info away, so all subscriptions must be recreated.
• You can upload files to content — not just images, but many filetypes including spreadsheets, etc. You can still upload inline images as well.
• You can create polls as forum topics.
• There is a new and improved search (though the index is slowly being rebuilt over the next few days, which may slightly degrade performance).
• There is now a mobile "skin" so that if you view the site on your Crackberry/iPhone/etc., it will only show the main navigation box, the "Active forum topics" box, and the main content.
• User profiles are now vaguely profile-y. You can view other users’ profiles (though not their email addresses), upload a profile picture, and change your username.
• There is now a private message system so that you can send messages directly to other piggs. Unfortunately it is still in development so it’s very barebones. For instance, you are not notified when you have received a new message — you have to explicitly check your messages. And you can’t existing delete messages. Clearly it’s a work in progress, but this feature will be greatly improved in the future, so I thought I would add it now and let people start playing around with it.

I made a lot of changes and had limited time to test, so if you see anything that looks broken please let me know.

update: A couple other things:

– I added a “quote” link at the bottom of content so that you can quote the post you are replying to.

– Something I forgot to mention on subscriptions. You can edit your user profile so that you will automatically be subscribed to any thread you comment on. (It’s always easy to unsubscribe). This has always been a feature but it’s pretty cool so I thought I’d mention it here.