The idea of building a Campus Sustainability Forum has been kicking around my organization for years. When the organization was choosing a CMS about three years ago, one of the major reasons we went with Drupal was the forum integration.

As co-organizer of the Triangle Drupal group, I've met some great people who have had some terrible experiences with Drupal. At the same time, I have become increasingly frustrated by my inability to accurately predict what Drupal projects will succeed and which will fail.

Preparation

A. Upgrade modules and Drupal core code

Although it’s tempting to move your files and database quickly, I strongly recommend doing some preparation first. Before I move Drupal site, I always first check for any new Drupal core and module updates. If there are modules that need to be updated, I do the update before moving my site. The advantage of this is that it is easier later on to debug any problems that arise during the migration if you are already using the latest version of all Drupal code.

I presented on Drupal at UNC's An Introduction to Content Management Systems workshop last week. The presentation is geared to people trying to decide between Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress. I hope that I swayed a few to the Drupal camp!

I often have a hard time deciding whether to use a CCK field or the taxonomy module when building Drupal sites. At Drupalcon, I was glad to see that I am not alone in my confusion. At the Drupalcon Drupal Taxonomy Revisted session, I finally started to understand the use case for each.

These are the steps I took to add the recent tweets block you see on the right of my blog page.

1. Created a new block with the Title and Block Description, "Recent Tweets."

2. Pasted the following code into the Block Body. I originally found the code here.

<div id="twitter_div">
<ul id="twitter_update_list"></ul></div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js"></script>

I recently wanted to add a variable to my book template with a list of contributors to a wiki page. My "wiki" is a node type and I am using the excellent revision moderation module to let users submit revisions to nodes. I really want to recognize those who submit revisions. To do so, I decided to add a list of revision authors on each wiki page.

I'm trying to decide between using a CCK field or taxonomy to classify content on a new site. We plan to have various node types (video, podcasts, forum topics, news articles, courses, etc.) and want to be able to dynamically pull together all nodes with the same tag in a page. There will be dynamic pages for both universities and topics. The topics will have a hierarchy. For example: