Making the site

As it was inevitable for me to really dive into Drupal to learn how it structured, today I finally took some steps in learning the code of Drupal. My test version is here.

I’m learning about how modules are structured and I’m getting to understand the way some of the snippets are built. I’m now starting to be able to make my own Profile page the way I want to. If I really get to understand all about Drupal, perhaps I might even be able to build the stuff I need myself. I almost added pictures to the buddylist, but that worked only for one buddy, so I’m not there yet.

Nothing else to mention, just letting you know there is some progress.

To let you know what’s going on with the test version:

The Drupal based test version is online at: http://www.makingthesite.com/drupal_test/

It’s far from perfect but it has some things working:

• Personal page/account (this means you can join the page right now)
• Group pages > being used as charity pages. I’m perhaps changing this later.
• Voting. You can vote on a group (/charity) page.
• Buddylist. You can set who your buddies are, only out of the people that have an account on this test page obviously.
• Categories. A charity can fit in a category. I’ve set up some for testing, but not all the right categories. Update; I changed the module; now it works like tags; I rather wan’t both, and categories and tags. I’ll try to fix this.
• Picture in your profile and auto-adding it to comments. This was no module, but just a really hard to find option.
• Search (upper right of test page), I finaly found out I had to ‘enable’ it in the menu..
• Private message, now you can send someone a message
• Guestbook, leave a message at a profile page of someone.

What I’m working on:

• Commenting on a group page. I can’t get this to work
• Search indexing using Cron.. I don’t know how to index the site automatically. If i read http://drupal.org/cron I see all sorts of nasty Unix code I don’t want to get into.. Anyone know how to index the site for search without using vague cron unix setting somewhere..? For now I’ll just go to the cron.php file by hand.
• I want to show all the categories on the first page. And in the menu somewhere. Update: somewhat done that with the snippet piece. That get’s it on the front page, but not yet in the menu. Also now I can choose between using a tag system with loose words or fixed categories, but I want both.
• I’d like to change the buddylist module so I can apply it to ‘charity pages‘. For now I use group pages as charity pages, I might change that later if that doesn’t work. I don’t like the email option in groups and I haven’t seen a way to loose that feature in groups. There are other stuff made for groups that are really good. One of them is that there is a connection somewhere between users and the groups, so it might be able to use that connections when trying to code my own ‘buddy’ part. If I don’t use the Groups as a starting point I have to code even more probably.
• I shouldn’t be playing with Google Maps as other things are far more important. It was nice to have implemented for 75 %. But to do it right it takes too much time and now it just clutters my adminstators interface.

If you happen to be a king in Drupal, please help me out a little with (one of) these things.

Here you can see my effort in creating a test version of Helpalot.
http://www.makingthesite.com/drupal_test

Feel free to take an account and play around with this alpha test version. But if you are a real charity, please don’t put a lot of energy in this. Leave your email adress at the contact form, and I’ll send you an email when a decent test version will be online that is actually usefull.

What I háve working is:

• Personal page/account (this means you can join the page right now)
• Group pages > being used as charity pages. You can put information about a charity on a page like this.
• Voting. You can vote on a group (/charity) page.
• Buddylist. You can set who your buddies are, only out of the people that have an account on this test page obviously.

I’m building the test version using Drupal, an open source program. I can use pieces of code that are freely available to build the test version. Putting these pieces together the way I want to is still difficult. So maybe you can help me out a little. An important part of Helpalot is that you can state on your personal page what charities you support. For now I have a buddylist module working leaving you able to state who your friends are, but not what charities you support.

For now a charity page is just a group page, and the buddylist module can’t link to that. Also I haven’t been able to allow people to comment on a group.

Update:

Okay, I like playing around. I have still a lot that doesn’t work the way I want to, but I just about got Google Maps working.

Also I just found out about snippets; pieces of code you can use for Drupal. I thought Modules where it, but snippets might lead me to some serious progress for this test version.