MAGBLOG

Today’s Plan

This is the first of my series of Building an NA Website with Drupal. I have been in Joomlalaland for too long and it is time to create a website with all the flexibility and usability that Drupal offers. With Drupal I can make it extremely easy for the inexperienced web maintainer to input and maintain site content safely. I cannot provide this simplicity with Joomla without the inclusion of several distinct and heavy extensions that do not play well together. It can be done but with great effort, template overrides and code bloat. Another advantage is the ability to efficiently administer the site. I am managing several Joomla NA sites and when a framework or major extension update releases it takes a lot of time to update all sites. Actually, I could list a multitude of advantages to using Drupal over Joomla.

These videos are very raw as I did not see the need to polish them up. Thus you will hear a lot of “ah” and “hm” as I drift off topic and make mistakes. Maybe someday I will edit them for prettiness, but I doubt it. I also do not have a time line for completion of the project as my time is very limited. Once the site is completed I plan on creating an install profile and Features modules to expedite the conversion of the other sites. I will make these available for webservants that want ‘em.

I am recording my steps in hope that it may help the next webservant to built their NA Drupal site. If this works good, maybe I will do one with WordPress also.

The Project

The Coastal Bend Area of Narcotics Anonymous, http://www.cbana.org/, has been a Joomla site for many years and has gotten away from me. The content structure is unwieldy and the code is no longer valid. These are some of the features I hope to get out of the Drupal site that I cannot get out of Joomla.

• Valid markup without having to chase issues at the module level
• Custom content types using CCK
• Flexible display using the Views (and possibly Panels) module
• Finely grained roles and permissions for maintainers and administrators
• Robust member/user features
• Simple interfaces for users of the site
• Wicked cool display options with jQuery at the heart

My list is actually a lot longer than that and the scope may change as time passes but it does give me a starting point.

Let’s Go

In the first video I install Drush and Drupal from the command line. It can be installed via ftp or through SimpleScripts and a plethora of other methods but those are pretty well documented elsewhere. So, if you are not comfortable with SSH and a command line interface, this first video may not be the one you want to start with. Drupal.org has extensive online documentation so between it and Google you should be able to get the site installed quickly. http://drupal.org/documentation/install

Installing Drupal Via Command Line from Tom Kraft on Vimeo.

Installing Drupal

I have no specific schedule, but I will be wrapping relevant content into the MAGSHARE site.

Just want to see how it works on this blog.
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A private fellowship site that has SCRNA history.

username: socal
pwd: willingness

This site is only for NA members.

We have many guideline documents that you may use as templates.

Just throwing this out there for any info,

In the West Tennessee Area of NA http://www.na-wt.org we are trying to
reach more suffering addicts through technology such as our website
and digital media; unfortunately, we know little about web design. We
noticed there are resources such as the Open Source Clean Time
Calculator on the web that can be modified and redistributed. Does
anyone know of any other resources such as flash or joomla templates
that we could use?

The Never Alone Site http://www.na12.org and the Red River NA
http://www.redriverna.org site look similar, were they designed by the
same person or is there a template being used?

Thanks.

In Service,
Brad H

I’ve moved stuff onto a new server.

Not to worry. It’s all still here, but you may need to update your links.

The NArchive is now at http://magshare.org/narchive.

I have finished the first bug fix version for the BMLT release. It fixes a couple of fairly significant bugs, and restores the “change rollback” and “undelete meetings” functionalities.

Read about it here.

After more than a year of design and development, the Basic Meeting List Toolbox (BMLT) is almost ready for its debut.

“Release Candidate” means that I believe it is ready for general release.

Read about it here.

There is entirely to many reported instances of “theft of n.a. funds”. When these things are discovered, what do we do about it. Most of the time nothing gets done. Most of the time practical procedures were not followed. How do we prevent these things from happening, or can we?

What about requiring an area or regional treasurer to be bonded? What could be good or bad about this idea?

The clear Property

The clear property tells the browser to make sure that the element with the clear property applied, gets put under an element with a float property applied. However, you can make a clear property react only to elements floated on the left, or on the right (or either one).

The clear property has four possible values: “none”, “left”, “right” and “both”. It is described as “Set the side of an element where other elements are not allowed.” Like the float property, it can only be applied to block-level elements. It also is useful when used in conjunction with floated elements.

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