As much as I love a good forum, and considering that forums come right in the base Drupal install, it is very odd that I hadn't added a forum to DrupNewb until now.

I guess you could say that with the existance of the forums on the main Drupal site (http://drupal.org/forum) the world doesn't really need another Drupal forum, and you would be correct.

Still, a good Drupal learning site does need a forum, so there you have it.

I wanted to see how easy it is to set up a new theme for Drupal, and it is indeed very easy. Mind you, all I did was to take an existing theme(bluemarine), copied it, changed a few things in the css to make the text green, and installed it. So, if I had any design skills at all I'll be at it for hours, but the basic concept here is quite simple.

Step 1 - find a base theme to work with.
I choose bluemarine

Step 2 - copy that theme's entire folder into a new folder with a new name.
I copied themes/bluemarine to sites/all/themes/greenmarine

Step 3 - change your copied theme.

You may wonder why a cutting edge Drupal site like DrupNewb is still mired at V5.x, and hasn't made the jump to V6.x.

Well, don't forget that you need to have all the supporting modules you need for a version of Drupal available if you want to bring them up to that version. Unfortunately, I added a bunch of modules to DrupNewb to test them out. Now I need to either get rid of some modules, wait until v6 versions of those modules are available, or just move them up to 6 and "see what happens".

I've been using the Eclipse editor (www.Eclipse.org) for about 2 years now, and I really like the latest version of Eclipse which is 3.3. If you will be using Eclipse with Drupal, which is to say with PHP, you can save yourself a lot of time and trouble by installing the "all in one" version of Eclipse for PHP (http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/). Don't forget, you want the all in one PDT (Php Development Tools).

I received a few emails from drupal.org suggesting that there were security flaws with the Drupal core for versions before 5.6, and that if I wasn't up to 5.6 I should upgrade. So, I followed my own instructions from the last time I upgraded (http://www.drupnewb.com/node/26), and things went fine. I must admit, that the first time I upgraded Drupal it seemed difficult. This time it didn't seem difficult at all.

Unless, of course, my site has some big problem I haven't noticed yet.

Not sure what benefits this upgrade has besides patching the security flaw.

Has nothing whatsoever to do with Drupal, but I went to the San Diego Zoo yesterday (New Years Day) to see Zhen Zhen, the new baby Panda. Cute!

Here's the video I took. Not easy to get video of her, as they have a long line, and so really keep you moving.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MK-xbNG_QI

So I read the manual install instructions for Ubercart, and it's pretty extensive. Among other things, you have to install a bunch of modules before you install Ubercart. This kind of makes sense, if you are writing a really robust system for Drupal you are bound to use some of the great stuff already available for Drupal.

Having worked in the past with a few shopping carts, and even written part of one myself (www.fluffycat.com/Java-Cart/), I thought I'd give one of the Drupal carts a go. So, I've decided to install Ubercart. I don't think I have any actual products to sell on DrupNewb, so maybe I'll just sell digital media like cat photos (if you can sell digital media with Ubercart) or something small like beach pebbles or pennies. I don't really want to sell any of these goods, but to thoroughly test Ubercart out want to set up the cart as if I intend to sell something.

I haven't posted for a while here at DrupNewb.com, and this is mainly because I took a job where I'm working with CakePHP. Comparing CakePHP to Drupal is like comparing Avocados to Oranges, because they aren't exactly meant to be the same thing. CakePHP and Drupal are both written in PHP. Both can use a number of DBMSs, including MySQL.

I read on Drupal.org that if I wasn't at Drupal 5.5 I should upgrade, as it fixed a "critical problem". DrupNewb was at Drupal 5.3. (Gasp!!!) I'm not sure that this critical problem would really have affected DrupNewb.com, but I certainly wanted to try out a Drupal upgrade.

I'll give a brief recount of some of what I did, but please follow the official Drupal 5.5 UPGRADE.txt instructions if you are doing this upgrade, as I am not covering all of what you need to do.