I have once again signed up for NaBloPoMo to get myself back in the regular blogging habit. I've joined the DreamInCode and Midwestern bloggers groups, so I'm looking forward to seeing what others are writing about. This year, instead of being hosted on a private website, it is being hosted on Ning, the do-it-yourself social networking platform. That's interesting to me in and of itself as I read and enjoy the blog of one of the founders of Ning (and several other big companies), Marc Andreessen, so I am also curious to see if all the nice things he says about it are true.

Yet another great thing about NaBloPoMo is that it gave me an excuse to finally undertake a project I have been putting off for months: migrate this blog from WordPress to Drupal such that it fits in with the rest of the Distance Software site. Drupal is a general content management system, so I can host my main site and articles, plus have a blog, a file sharing area, project maangement, and what have you, which I couldn't do (easily) with WordPress. However, I didn't want to just use the default blogging feature, which leaves much to be desired, so I've been frantically installing modules and configuring the system to begin to approximate what you'd get with a normal blog. Here are some of the steps I took:

1. First, I needed to import all the content from WordPress into Drupal. That proved to be very straightforward using the fabulous converter tool found here. One oddity: when I entered my database settings, it didn't like "localhost" for the hostname, but it happily accepted 127.0.0.1, so a word to the wise.
2. Next I removed all the posts from the front page (this is the default for some reason), and decided I wanted to have a nice paged series of posts instead of one huge page, so I created a new view using the Views module that filtered to show nodes of type "blog" and status "published". I set it to be at the URL /shoutingdistance so that people looking for the old blog would be redirected to the new page.
3. I wanted my posts to show up with nice URLs like /this-is-my-latest-post instead of node/124, so I used the ever-popular pathauto module to set that up, and created nice aliases for the existing and future posts.
4. I needed syndication to be set up correctly. This turned out to be a breeze with Views, because they already offer an RSS argument option. A search for the concept quickly turned up this page, which explains how to set it up. I switched feedburner to use that new URL, and then I installed the feedburner module to redirect all accesses for the existing feed to the FeedBurner feed, which seems to be working, but we shall see.

So now I have something that approximates a blog, but I have quite a few things left to do:

1. It's using my default page template so it ends up laying out all weird (this is mostly my fault for making a screwed up CSS template in the first place), but I want to override that with a new format.
2. There aren't any archives or anything. I need to create another view that can be added as a block on the blog page so that people can see older posts in a simpler way.
3. Turn on goodies like Akismet and Bad Behavior to block spam and spam attempts, so I can turn comments on. Right now folks, you are SOL.

I will continue to post on the various improvements as they happen, but I hope this helps others who might be considering transitioning from traditional blogging software to Drupal. It's definitely doable, but it's definitely not out-of-the-box ready for blogging, in my opinion.