Drupal 6 Update
I have been busy porting the site over to Drupal 6. Since Drupal 5 themes won't work with Drupal 6 I've had to go and make a new one. I am using the Zen theme engine since it's pretty dead simple to work with and the final result is far more attractive than what I have now. The site looks more Web 2.0-ish. Things are much simpler now, but there's some interesting eye candy in the form of dynamically generated drop shadows under the sidebar divs. It's so much easier than making tables and grey PNGs. Of course anybody who visits without Javascript (or using the stupid NoScript Firefox extension) will be out of luck but at this point the web is pretty much broken for folks that don't allow Javascript to run, so I am not going to stress too much over it.
Porting the content was the hardest task so far. Cut and paste, cut and paste. Boring, boring work made harder by various gotchas in the editors. I spent a lot of time fixing word wrap issues.
I'm hoping to launch the new site on Jan 1.
Drupal Decision
I've made a decision about which way I am going to go with my Drupal site. I'm going to ditch vBDrupal and go right with the mainline Drupal 6 distribution. I'm going to lose the nifty vB powered commenting system, and will have to manually create Drupal users for all of my contributing authors, but the fact of the matter is that it's a small price to pay to get back to a platform that's more actively developed.
Frustrated
As you may know, I run a fairly large website over at njpinebarrens.com. It's made up of three components - vBulletin discussion forums, Drupal CMS, and PhotoPost Pro image gallery. The forums are the part of the site that get the most amount of traffic. The Drupal side holds all of the articles that myself and other contributors have written. The Photopost site is a free image hosting area for folks to upload their pictures of the Pine Barrens.
One of the nice aspects of the site is that it integrates Drupal and vBulletin together. I use a fork of Drupal called vBDrupal which more or less is a hacked up version of Drupal that replaces all of Drupal's user database with vBulletin's, as well as replacing Drupal's article commenting system with vB. So, when a user signs up in vB they automatically get an account made for them in Drupal. This is not a huge deal for the every day user, but for those who contribute articles it makes life easier for me as I can just add their user account as the author. Then, when someone reads an article written by a contributing author they can click on a link and go to that person's profile and contact them if they want.
The other great thing is the article commenting system. If I post an article in Drupal the system will automatically create a thread in vBulletin, and any comments get posted to that thread. Then, when you go visit the article in Drupal you see all of the comments presented on the same page of the article. It's really very nice.
The big problem is that vBDrupal is a fork of Drupal and as such development severely lags behind the mainline Drupal distribution. Drupal 6 has been out for a few months and vBDrupal still is in version 5. The occasional security patch for vBDrupal gets rolled out, but it appears that development on the software has stagnated. If you ask for a timeframe on vBDrupal 6 you get a "when we're ready" response which I can appreciate, but it doesn't help me decide what direction I want to take with my site.
I have been playing with Drupal 6 in a sandbox and it's really, really nice. I would love to migrate over to Drupal 6, but I'd be losing a bunch of functionality. There is a bridge for Drupal 6 and vB, but it in effect does the opposite of what vBDrupal does. It will take users from vB and create them in Drupal's database. This would be alright except that the vB database only has the hash for the password, so I can't bulk import users. It will only import a user if they log in through Drupal, which I don't even want to expose to my users. I can have authentication happen via cookie, but I won't come close to importing my entire userbase over, which I need to do before I roll Drupal 6 live. My only option for rolling out a Drupal 6 site would be to manually create users for each person who has ever written an article and ditch the commenting system entirely.
Another option would be to switch from Drupal to Subdreamer, which is not open source but promises a very rich integration with vB. A license costs $99 so it's not quite a trivial investment. At the moment their online demo seems to be down (and judging from their forum, seems to have been down for a while). I've also heard grumblings about how nobody writes any free plugins for it, so it could end up costing me a ton of money down the road.
So now I'm at an impasse. There's a lot I want to do with the CMS side of the site, but I feel like I need to get some sort of direction. I can make the decision to stay with vBDrupal and eventually fall too far out of date with Drupal. I can go to a non-forked version of Drupal and lose several nice features but go back to a mainline distribution and not have to worry about being caught without security fixes or cool new features. Finally, I could go closed source and possibly be nickeled and dimed to death for everything I want to implement.
At this point in time I think I just need to stop thinking about it for a few days.
Online Memories
I think a lot of us thirty-somethings look back to our teen years and reminisce about how we used to get online before the Internet became prevalent. At least to me there's something special about the sound of two modems handshaking before falling silent and the ANSI characters of the BBS began flowing across a terminal. That's something that's entirely alien in today's world of instant-on connections. QModem Pro has been replaced by Firefox. The local BBS has been replaced by message boards. Now the friends you have online are just as likely to be on another continent as they are being down the street.
I remember the day I got my first modem. I was a freshman in high school and somehow I managed to save up enough money for a Best Data 14.4 ISA modem. I installed it in my ALR 486SX/20 and loaded the floppy disk for Prodigy. I signed up for an account and used it for a few times, not really knowing what I was doing. A classmate then told me about another online service... a BBS. Unlike the primitive graphics of Prodigy, this was totally text based, but it was easier to navigate and understand. I fired up whatever the terminal emulator was in Windows 3.1 and dialed the number that he gave, and connected to The HoT SpoT BBS in Long Branch.
I signed up for an account using my real name - a terribly newbie mistake, and navigated around the BBS for a little while before my "time limit" expired and I was kicked off for the day. The HoT SpoT was a multi-line BBS running MajorBBS, which allowed it to multitask and hence let callers interact with each other. The sysop of THS was Terry Perkas, a Monmouth University student who's parents owned a diner somewhere up in North Jersey. To get more time on THS you would have to buy credits -- N number of credits was equal to X number of minutes. From THS I branched out to other local boards - The Twilight Zone, Ironhorse BBS, and a host of other boards.
The best part about the BBS's was that the people you'd meet were local. I was one of the very few people from my school who went online, but I met a number of kids from Ocean Township High, Wall Township High, and Long Branch High. We were all the usual socially awkward computer nerds, but it amazed me to see how these people acted online. What we take for granted today - the concept of people's online persona being radically different than their real life persona - was something new (to me, at least) then.
Being a broke kid, it was hard to afford credits for the site. I eventually became friends with (read: kissed the ass of) Terry, and would pester him for free credits. I befriended a lot of the other sysops -- I got "elite" access on a few of the local pirate boards. On other sites, I had unlimited downloads of shareware. One site let me become co-sysop, and I was responsible for validating all of the new uploads, scanning them for viruses, and adding the board's FILE_ID.DIZ file to each of them. There was a connection between all of us online -- something that's hard pressed to be found in most web boards or chat rooms.
Then, in late '95 the Internet hit Monmouth County. Monmouth Internet (now Monmouth Telecom) opened, and offered shell and SLIP access on their BSD box. I found them by seeing an ad in the Asbury Park Press. I signed up for an account (I was bruset@monmouth.com) and through some fluke of their billing system was never charged for more than 3 years. Around the same time, the Asbury Park Press opened up InJersey.com. This was a combination BBS/PPP internet gateway. Many of the kids from THS and the other boards flocked over to InJersey, which was free. I loaded Trumpet Winsock on my PC (now a home built 486 DX2/66) and fired up Netscape Navigator .99N and was transported to an entirely new world.
Web 1.0 killed the local BBS. For a time the local BBS's resisted the change by claiming the same things that I now think were great but previously thought were dumb -- a sense of community, speed of communications, friendships, etc. Boards either had to change or die, and sadly most of them did the latter. THS, feeling the squeeze, bought the module that would allow for incoming telnet requests to be handled by MajorBBS (later upgraded to Worldcomm), email (username@bbs.hspot.com), and I think even newsgroup access.
By the end of 1996 I was mixing my time on Monmouth Internets shell (shell.monmouth.com) and their PPP connection. I also surripticiously used a router at Monmouth University that was set to allow dial in access to telnet out to other sites (the odd BBS, MUDs, etc.) I befriended a girl, Meredith Borakove, who went to school at UPenn, who taught me rudamentary HTML. (She was also the first person I met who used a Mac outside of the writing lab at Monmouth Regional.) Meredith had a personal website (Meredith's World of Queso), the concept of which absolutely fascinated me. Here was the ability to inexpensively make a presence online. Fortunately, Monmouth Internet offered a whopping 10MB worth of space for web pages on their shell box, and I quickly took advantage of it.
Web 1.0 -- maybe this all predates Web 1.0 -- was an interesting time. For the first time people from disparate geographic regions were able to talk to one another freely (as in beer.) The barrier to entry was still very high - connections were hard to find, and most people on the 'net at that time were from academia, so the collective IQ of the bunch was higher. Things would affect the community as a whole. If Mae East was having problems (and when was it not?) the Internet was insufferable. When the Communications Decency Act passed in 1996, everybody turned their homepages black in protest. Everbody had the EFF's Blue Ribbon Campaign logo on their site. We all bult sites for Netscape browsers, listening to MP3's on Winamp.
I'm not really sure what killed Web 1.0. Maybe it was when AOL allowed their userbase to go on the internet at large and post in USENET. Maybe it was when Windows 95 hit, and the Internet Browser Wars took off. The more people that went online, the less of a personable place the web became. By the late 1990s, high speed internet had taken off. Wired Magazine was the hottest thing out there. The revolution happened. And then the tech bubble burst. All of the kids who grew up on BBS's and were in the right places with the right startups made (and mostly lost) their fortunes. The web became a darker, more cynical place as corporations took over.
The web of today is sterile and clean. AJAX has taken over, and the personal homepage has been replaced by the blog or Twitter feed. I never ran a BBS (although I set many of them up locally on my PC), but today I run a fairly large (larger than The HoT SpoT BBS was) online community.
There are days when I look at my PuTTY window and dream:
[bruset@atsion ~]$ telnet bbs.hspot.com
Trying 216.35.197.68...
telnet: connect to address 216.35.197.68: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused
*sigh*
Here's to The HoT Spot, InJersey, Terry, Meredith, the kids who ran the pirate Oblivion/2 boards, and everyone who made Web 1.0 possible. Godspeed.