running with paper

It’s been quiet around here lately; busy with family and year-end, and pulling together freelance work out in the wilds of the internet.

Today I started, again, installing Drupal on a customer site. I’d installed it a few times before, but this was a planned total new installation. Moving to 6.15, getting the site out of beta into release shape, the whole nine yards.

Usually I check drupal.org first, looking for updates – this time I knew from a friend that 6.15 was out and included a number of security updates. Fine by me: most of what I’d done shouldn’t be affected by any changes. Install, move the content over to the new database, then get the final touches, such as hiding the User Login fields, live.

Installation – smooth. Modules – uploaded. Themes – migrated. Content – moved and updated. User Login fields – not doing what I want. Okay, fine. Dr Google to the rescue. Most sites say the same thing as drupal.org – turn off the block and access it by typing in sitename.com/username. Not my first choice on a site that is publishing user names right and left, but I’ll try it. After all, it is in the official documentation, it must be right!

Not really. I don’t know if it was this fix or an earlier fix, but you can’t do that in Drupal 6 any more, I think. As of this writing, drupal.org is down for maintenance. So I fiddled in another direction, and that seems to have solved the issue.

1. First, make sure you are logged in to your site as an administrator. I have no idea how to do this if you’ve lost your login fields already – sorry.
2. Create a new Page, name it something you can remember, such as yourspecialPage. Publish it, but do not put it on the front page.
3. Edit the visibility of the login block such that it appears only on that new Page by selecting the page visibility option to show the page only on yourspecialPage (no leading or trailing slashes).

Now your login block only appears on sitename.com/yourspecialPage/.

It might not be a code bug, but rather a security feature – so, then simply a doc bug. Either way, nice to exercise those muscles again.

Back in my customer service days, we had a trophy the office manager had made up of an old sports trophy, a nice red triangular rock, and googly eyes from the craft store. It was a silly award, given for good ideas in later or mockingly to mind-numbingly clueless customers, vendors, or ourselves …

I’ve been going through my papers for year-end, and came across a notebook I kept in my corporate days, listing the bug reports and software improvements I’d recommended over the previous year. I was aiming for one a week for a year but didn’t quite make my goal. I wonder if they took up any of the suggestions, or if any were in the pipeline and are now out there (even if I didn’t come up with it first).

And it’s funny; that’s why I started in this business – not liking some of the bugs and usability annoyances of software. Wanting to do something about it, and getting there by suggesting fixes and writing down what needed to be worked around, teaching my co-workers back in the day to use *NIX based software on terminals and in emulation environments.

Happy New Year, happy bug and feature hunting!