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.

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.

Big thanks to Devin Heitmueller for giving me a hand with some of the Javascript. Also thanks to Google for making their excellent maps API available.

Finished my first proof of the site design. Sill needs more cowbell. I'm trying to put off learning Joomla 1.5 templating as well. Too bad WordPress is a target for comment spammers, and that it sucks for displaying menus of content well.

The side effect of all of this exploration is that I really want to take NJPineBarrens.com to the next level. In a previous post here I mentioned that every time I redesign the site it ends up being way more trouble than it's worth, but the reality is that I haven't been satisfied with the site running WordPress, I haven't been satisfied with the design, and I haven't been satisfied with the presentation of the content.

I've decided that I'm going back to Joomla. I want to go with Joomla 1.5 RC3, although maybe by the time I'm ready it will be released in final version. I tried Drupal, more specifically vBDrupal, which is designed to be integrated with vBulletin forums. A lot of people rail on Drupal for being complicated, and for sure it is, but by far the biggest drawback - at least in my opinion - is that it's delivered to the webmaster too spartan. To build your site, you're left having to load various plugins to do nearly everything - and a lot of them don't work 100%. Important items like a WYSIWYG editor for articles are available as plugins, not as part of the core Drupal distribution. TinyMCE, which is what Joomla as well as WordPress use, is a plugin for Drupal, but has some serious problems with Firefox. (Specifically <b> tags being generated for bold text, instead of <strong>) I'm going back to Joomla because - while Joomla's content organization and SEO is not on par with Drupal, the core components to publish articles are all there, and I can just integrate Joomla with vBulletin by using the plugin that I paid for at BBPixel.

So, this leads me to the visual design. I've been using the current design at NJPB for about two years now. There's a somewhat fluid center column that is either a max of 1050 pixels, or a minimum of 760 (or thereabouts.) There's a bit of Javascript that loads in a random image on the top of the screen with the site logo, and a navigation bar below it. My users like the random image, so I'll figure out some way of including that in the new design, but I really need to clean it up and make it way more interesting.

I found some interesting links tonight - 60 Elegant and Appealing Designs, Current Web Site (ironically enough served in ColdFusion), Liquid Web Design, and Don't Decorate - Communicate. I'm going to be scouring those over for inspiration. I want to go with a "less-is-more" theme, with lots of easy to find and read content.

I swear, once I get the site looking how I want, I'll be adding more content to it!