I've been making slow, steady progress towards recapturing in Drupal everything that WordPress provided out of the box. Here are my most recent updates:
- Added a recent posts block and archive by month block on the right side using Views. That seems to work very well. This also gave me "posts by month" pages for free.
- Enabled the autosave module to store blog entries (and any content, really) that I am writing every 10 seconds or so.
- This is more a convenience thing than an actual necessity, but I remapped all URLs of the form ?m=XXXXYY, which were old WordPress style URLs and are what is still in Google, to map to new month/XXXXYY URLs using apache mod_rewrite. If folks are interested, I'm happy to share my RewriteCond and RewriteRule directives.
- I forgot to mention this last time, but I have installed the TinyMCE module so that I can get WYDSIWYG editing for any content, including blog posts.
- Turned on the ping module to ping pingomatic with updates.
- Enabled anonymous commenting, and made the comment form show up for each blog entry. I added a simple text CAPTCHA because that seems to be the least offensive of the options. With WordPress, I used Akismet and Bad Behavior and got 10 or so spam comments a week that had to be deleted and the occasional one that slipped through. I think an easy CAPTCHA is a better approach. If it fails or is too onerous, I'll add the Akismet and Bad Behavior modules.
Still todo:
- CSS template still horribly screwed up. Sorry it looks so bad. I think I'm going to write a simple new theme from scratch that holds all the necessary info and that I really understand, rather than try to hack an existing one as I did with the current version.
- Remap some of the old WordPress URLs that are still in google to their new equivalents to keep my incoming links correct.
- Spell check
- ???
It's starting to approximate a halfway decent blogging platform, with surprisingly little work.