Southend Linux Wiki Site

Wiki Server Update

It may have escaped everyone's attention but this SoSLUG Wiki site is now running on Drupal 6 a significant web site upgrade.

This upgrade was not without it's problems, not least of which was the lack of drupal_wiki profile which still is only available for Drupal 5 and is core to the development of this site. Drupal Modules upgrades also proved problematic especially the views module.

There is an issue with Drupal 5 Views module in that this is the Views version 1 and Drupal 6 uses version 2, the problem on this occasion manifests itself resulting in no views for any of the itemised menu pages, when the database is ported over to the new site. As it turns out the solution was to export each of the views created and import these into the new Views version 2. I can't help but winge at this point because of the unbelievable amount of effort and time it has taken me struggling to bring this site on line.

XMLSitemap was another module which I used on the previous site with good effect and more importantly no database errors displayed, however with Drupal 6 no matter what I tried or how many times the module was upgraded errors relating to XMLSitemap where displayed. A decision was made admittedly by me that whilst having xmlsitemap would be preferable it was not essential to the running of this site.

Once I had removed XMLSitemap and imported the old Views into the new version things began to work, but not everything, wikitools is a necessary module for this site as was I thought PEARWiki module. I encountered problems with the recognition of the Mediawiki format which prevented the correct display of created wiki pages. All wiki pages where created using a particular and common Mediawiki style format eliminating the use of complex tags and encoding methods. I should say at this point that I have been working on this new site for several months, perhaps not a continues basis but certainly on a near daily one. As I perhaps have inter-mated already the problem was located in the Pearwiki module on this occasion and even though the module available was available for Drupal 6 it does not work or to be more precise does not work with views version 2 and the individual wiki pages. Reading the related material on the official Drupal site concerning the Pearwiki module it became apparent that a similar module called Flexifilter could possibly replace the Pearwiki module this according to the documentation I read flexifilter was the prefered module to use.

There are still problems with the site but these effect administrators and not individual page creators, so the impact is a manageable, one of these problems relates to the Drupal 6 views module. When creating a new or cloned view you should be able to select the input format the page view itself is displayed in, for things like view headers and footers. Drupal 6 Views version 2 as of the date of this article failed to work regarding the views input format we are not able to evaluate the reasons for this we are just giving an account for others and as workable log of the work accomplished.

In terms of man hours getting this wiki site to work with Drupal 6 has been a mammoth task and way beyond that which I would have expected. Documentation was for me unclear in a number of very important areas. Here is account of the changes I made to get Drupal 6 to work

• Transfered and modified drupal_wiki profile removing module names not valid with that for Drupal 6 Modules
• Obtained and updated all the drupal 6 modules that drupal 5 drupal_wiki profile requires
• Added common modules shared across this and other sites such as image img_assist and views
• Substituted Pearwiki module for that of flexifilter
• Modified input formats for wiki_page to include Mediawiki format specifically in Administer/Site Configuration
• Deleted after consistent database warning messages XMLSitemap
• Imported and modified all modules as necessary as this site depends heavily on views

For this migration all modules and configuration have been kept extremely simplistic in an effort to hone in and identify common problems without effecting more complex operations that may be added in the future. So in essence fix the common problems first and build later.

Flexifilter module development version is not a suitable upgrade probably why it is called a dev version then but Flexifilter 6.x-1.1-rc2 does work well sought of there are some embeded commands that do work and some that don't so you may need to use some html formating to overcome these temporary problems.

Tags are used on each wikipage to help define the format of any text that is entered for any given article. For instance the use of.

==text== will produce the following text format

text

This defines text that should use html code second level header other levels can be defined smaller than h2

<h2>text</h2> giving the result below of

text

With the previous Pearwiki module you where able to use [http://url.com sometext] to define a URL link to another internal page or external site flexifilter has not allowed this operation this could be due to format changes that I maybe unaware of or an additional module is required to work with flexifilter. Bullets are similarly effected in the flexifilter module.