i recently updated this site to drupal 6.

it was a fairly delicate task.

i had to follow a few steps to make sure that the update worked ok. the first is to put the site on maintenance mode and to backup all my database, settings of the old drupal 5 site. then i created a duplicate "staging" site to test the new site with the new drupal 6 code. then i had to test each version 6 module and themes to make sure that it worked on the new site. once, i got that working, then i ported over to the "production" site. standard upgrade procedures i guess.

still, doing all this at night was not the best. the mind often doesn't work that well at night. lol.

Today was a bit of a busy day.

started with some discussions on some home design with ju, hijaz and kahar. they shared their websites as follows:

http://www.blogger.com/profile/16807998016910934448
http://bahahouse.blogspot.com/
http://bungalowdesign.blogspot.com/
http://sabrihouse.blogspot.com/
http://zainihouse.blogspot.com/
http://hizalsbungalow.blogspot.com/
http://binarumah.ambok.net/

unfortunately, our ambitions are not for big houses. :)

This site and many of my other website projects are run on the Drupal content management engine.

Therefore, i am excited that the new drupal 5 release is now out. For information, this site and my main "live" website my-kart.org are both using drupal 4.7.

4.7 is a fairly stable release and i am happy with it. however, version 5 comes with additional features (naturally), and productivity improvements such as a better user management system (something very useful for me). the rest of the improvements are contained in the release announcement.

I post this on the drupal website at http://drupal.org/node/91684

I have posted a couple of requests for support on the following threads:

http://drupal.org/node/62255
http://drupal.org/node/62255#comment-126256

http://drupal.org/node/64591#comment-122097

...but can't seem to get any answers. perhaps my requests are buried deep in the thread. so i decide to create a new thread to seek help.

what i am trying to achieve

i would like to setup more than one drupal site using a single code base. each site would have different settings / databases. i do not want to have subdomains (although this could be a later requirement) or parked domains (as suggested by fidelis on http://drupal.org/node/62255#comment-126409). my response: i intend to set up various community interest sites with a single domain as being the traffic aggregator, so the additional domains is not an option.

Been swapping themes on this website, and note some good practices that I'd like to adopt for my default site.

1. vertically aligned search box in the top menu: alternate / lincoln's revenge does it well
2. clean layouts like a printed page: chameleon does this well
3. blockquote techniques - the left bar at the indentation of the quote is good
4. different type face for headline titles - say using Georgia to distinguish headline from body text
5. lines to separate content blocks
6. different block style for "sticky" blocks
7. distinct menu headers like the type used by gworks

I am planning to do a few things:

1. installing a taxanomy access control module

   I did some research on the subject by first visiting http://drupal.org/ and went straight to the drupal module downloads. Read a bit on the taxonomy access module and find that this would require me to patch the existing core taxonomy.module - now I am no expert on unix patching and my linux host only provides me a cpanel access... so I cannot do patching without a shell access to the host. Also read that patching also is a bit of a minefield, so scratch that thought. Let's wait for another solution to come up.

Another mega-cool feature of drupal is the ability to add RSS news feeds to my website. I've just activated the news feeds which can be accessed by the news aggregator or the world news links on every page on this website.

My wandering mind will not ever allow me to be happy with a single layout structure.

I was moderately happy with the previous layout which I named "Tokyo" but that had its limitations in relation to dealing with large size images.

Ok, back a bit.

I just activated the image gallery module in this website. The image gallery will allow authorised users to upload images into a directory, and display them on this website. Unfortunately, the previous right column menu layout was not able to cater for large size images as the image would either run over the menu, or push the menu beyond the limited width. So I had to find another suitable layout.