MakeMineATriple meets Drupal

So I’ve completed my switch-over to Drupal from Wordpress. As I mentioned in my previous post, the content migration bit was actually pretty easy and quick (I used the wordpress_import module). While I did need to do a bit of tidying up here and there, that was mainly because I’ve started using the GeSHi filter to do code syntax highlighting within my posts, and additionally because I wanted to switch from the old Wordpress “categories” which I’d been using: now everything’s free-tagged.

The biggest bit of the job was getting things looking right. In some cases the effort was purely down to the fact that I was giving the site a fresh look (though for me, doing that in Drupal was a lot quicker than in Wordpress), but in several areas I found that I wanted to build on the out-of-the-box functionality of Drupal to gain behaviour a bit more akin to Wordpress defaults. While my decision to move to Drupal was definitely the right move for me, this does highlight the point that if you just want to get a blog online without needing to get too involved with any code, then Wordpress is an excellent choice.

There were a few modules I installed to enhance Drupal’s behaviour as a blogging platform:

• comment_notify - enabling users to be notified if a comment they post is replied to, or alternatively of any subsequent comments.
• pingback - a mimic of the pingback functionality seen in Wordpress.
• mollom - for spam filtering (I used akismet in Wordpress). Mollom does analysis of the text being posted and either completely blocks a spam post, or if it isn’t sure, gives a CAPTCHA.

Alongside these, I did a bit of custom theming of the comments templates to improve the presentation if no comments had been made, and to include a count of the number of comments posted at the top of the list of comments.

The only other areas were pretty standard - ensuring that views and my profile were set up, and standard Drupal theming work. It all seems to be working, but drop me a line if you spot anything odd! I’ve not yet done much cross-browser testing, but other than the CSS3 which will just degrade, there’s nothing unusual and things should be in order.