Site Updates

Submitted by melvin on Sat, 02/28/2009 - 19:18

R-SPEC.org's maintenance this morning (3/1) was mostly successful. There are a few elements of the theme that didn't make it through, and we lost one block. But we've gained more capability and the system is now more secure, easier to keep up to date, and is now capable of exploiting a whole new set of tools. 

Unfortunately, the main thing you're liable to notice on the short term is that we lost one block (the "recent stories" block) and there are some glitches in the site's layout due to the fact that I had to port the theme to Drupal 6 fairly quickly.

The maintenance was primarily aimed at getting the core system upgraded to Drupal 6, which will do two things:

  1. Make the system easier to keep updated, which is important for security and bugfixing. Drupal 6 has a nifty self-auditing system that keeps track of module updates and places special emphasis on ones tagged for security.
  2. Allow us to get access to new tools that will facilitate integrating with Facebook (and other social media vectors) and Amazon. You'll start to see the effect of that in coming weeks.

That is all.

Recent stories block showing up

On March 2nd, 2009 eDave says:

Either you already fixed it, or it's behaving differently for others, because I have the recent stories/posts block in my view of the page. It looks good and is working properly. Thanks, again, Eric!

Recent Stories is really the

On March 2nd, 2009 escoles says:

Recent Stories is really the only way into the blogs in the current information architecture, so I wanted to be sure we got it back post-haste. I've cleaned up the presentation a little, too.

We may have to live with the centered text in the editor for a while, though -- it's an easy but time-consuming fix.

It's a whole-number version

On March 1st, 2009 melvin says:

It's a whole-number version upgrade, so some things will be different. Including having a working WYSIWYG editor, a little later today. (TinyMCE just never worked right on this site; we'll now be using FCKEditor, which I've had good luck with on sites I build for work.)

I'll have a summary document in a few days. First I need to try to get the Amazon integration stuff working.

Thank you, Eric.

On March 1st, 2009 eDave says:
Thank you for your work in updating the site, Eric. I'm sure it will have a beneficial effect, and the recent stories block was being a bit dodgy the last few days, anyway. The admin section for my login is different, too, if that makes a difference.