Normal Service Resumed

Some have commented that we haven't been eating our own dogfood by keeping *our* site updated often. We've been quite busy in a bit of an upgrade and migration project moving from one system to another. We thought it would be simple, and on paper it is, but the best laid plans and all that…. We made a decision to stop development on our own content management system over a year ago and moved almost everything over to Civicspace version 2 (0.8.2). Civicspace, for those who don't know, is a version of Drupal, a bewilderingly amazingly complex and capable content management system. What the Civicspace folks did was to package a user-friendly, easily installable version of Drupal and bundle into it the equally amazing CiviCRM Customer Relationship Management system. This was the same system that was used to create Deanspace and was instrumental in helping Howard Dean raise $175million for his 2004 Presidential campaign. So in short, it's a proven system and infrastructure. That was good enough for us, and on the basis that Civicspace offered the best array of built in modules we chose it for our system. Now it's time, again, to move on to the next thing. Sadly, Civicspace appears to be moving to a fully hosted Applications Service Provider and all development will be done on Drupal itself. Added to this the fact that for some reason the upgrade path from our current version of Civicspace (essentially Drupal 4.6.x) up to Drupal 4.7 hasn't gone smoothly, we have decided to move everything over to Drupal 4.7.x, manually if necessary, and start afresh there. All our testing suggests this will not only work for all our sites but will be a nice enhancement for some. The last barrier to doing this fell earlier today when I was able to re-code one of the core Drupal wireframe themes to not only support fully floatable block areas (those are the menu bits on each side of the page in light green) but to do this whilst placing the most important content first in the page-code order, and so on in order of importance. The next big task is getting this to work in IE7 but as our logs don't reflect a big take up of it yet, it can wait.