x backup momex db
x backup momex files (everything)

x create mom1 (backup of wp)
x make mom1 work

x activate zen / momex
x activate offline mode

x download momdrupal in delayed inserts (works with bigdump)

x delete all modules in stock momdrupal
x copy all modeuls in 192momdrupal
x upload all modules from 192momdrupal to new momdrupal

x edit settings.php

Some terms:

• Mom1: the previous MomEx in WordPress.
• Zen: The amazing Drupal Zen Starter Kit theme that takes the pain (well, not totally but still quite a lot) out of Drupal theming. Love it.
• momdrupal: The 23mb. sql backup.
• 192momdrupal: My test momex installation on my server.
• bigdump: The absolutely essential open source tool that allows you to migrate large sql dbs. Absolutely essential since php only allows uploads of 2mb., so if you've got anything larger than that, you're in a fix. Oh did I say absolute essential? Just in case I forgot to add: Absolute Essential.

The only thing left is a weird clean urls issue that prevents me from using the permalink structure wordpress was using. Losing the permalinks is gonna be a disaster SEO wise, so I gotta try and make that work. Seems like I have hope though, with PathAuto, which seems fit for the job.

I haven't read through it yet since at this point, I've gotten tired. At the moment if you go to MomEx you'll see a 'we are offline' page which is an edited version of Drupals. I added a Feedburner Subscribe form to increase my subscription whilst working on the site. Cheeky, but I think it's useful.

At this rate MomEx will be up either tomorrow or Wed.

I used WordPress Import, a pretty powerful tool which is still in development mode. On the surface it's a straightforward process of installing the module, uploading your WordPress .wxr file and then mapping out which posts are 'owned' by which users (aka authors). It then transfers both posts and comments associated with it.

It becomes a hell of a lot more complicated though when your .wxr file is 17mb. like mine, and I have nearly a hundred different subscribers and authors.

The actual migration is extremely resource intensive, so to upload the big file and handle the job you need to tweak these things: One, php.ini to allow for a large upload (the default is only 2mb.), and Two, Drupal's settings.php to allow for both a longer session time and to for more RAM to do the job, otherwise you will receive errors midstream like I did, and only transfer, say, half your posts or an increment instead of all.

To be specific, I changed the line at php.ini from this:

; Maximum allowed size for uploaded files.
upload_max_filesize = 2M

to this:

; Maximum allowed size for uploaded files.
upload_max_filesize = 64M

Then you'll need to add these two lines to your settings.php:

ini_set('memory_limit', '128M');
ini_set('max_execution_time', 0);

Naturally you'll need to restart the webserver and make sure everything, including your other sites hosted on it, is fine. If you're doing this on a live server (meaning there are people reading the website), you need to do it quickly, then return the settings to their original immediately.

It so happened I bought a new domain so I'll be practicing on that one first before finally jumping onto MomEx.

Another issue that's been licked is the 'Clean URLs' problem. As I use Lighttpd, using .htaccess rules is out of the question, but I managed to find a good tutorial here, and another one that deals with imagecache issues, an important feature to handle images, using Lighttpd here.

There's only one more issue I need to fix before finally getting it all together.

MomEx's pageviews are counted by a WordPress Plugin called Clickcounter, which as the name suggest, registers a 'click' everytime someone views a page and displays it on the page plus stores it in the db.

A transfer to Drupal will negate all the registered hits! Drupal has its own click counter equivalent I'm sure, and I could probably tweak it to start counting where it left off, but that would require some MySQL magic which I'll have to investigate.

I know it sounds a little vain to want to keep all those registered hits but hey, we worked for those, some of which have gone up to the thousands. It'd be a pity to just lose it all.

When I do get that fixed there's the issue of finally migrating the site while it's online. That means I'd have to take it down for a a day or two just to make sure everything works. I can probably start on it in the morning and if I don't get it working, use the backups and go back to the old site in the evening, then start again the next day. The documentation I've read never mentioned these, as they all assumed you'd be migrating to a different domain. Migrating from WordPress to Drupal using the same domain is something new, so I plan to document it.

As with most daunting techie tasks I'm usually overwhelmed at the start but I eventually get over my wussiness and fix it, usually realizing it wasn't all that hard as I thought it was. In other words, I'm confident, and let's face it, getting something to work when a minute ago it seemed impossible feels GREEEAAAAT.

I'm excited about the fancy stuff I can implement once I get it on Drupal for sure, but the tremendous geekiness of it all is partly why I'm doing it as well I think.

Asides: I wanna show posts (or post titles, or post titles with excerpts) from specific categories on the sidebar. I have done this with limited success on BallEx on a category I called 'PBA Notes' (ftg. news fresh from the PBA), but unfortunately WordPress counting mechanism counts these posts as part of the posts that it should display on the front page, so everytime I post to the PBA Notes category, it removes a post from the index. It's not a terribly difficult issue and is 'resolved' somewhat by merely posting more (which I should be doing anyway), but it's kept me stumped for too long a while already, and prevents me from putting even more categories on the sidebar. At the moment the setting on BallEx for 'Options > Reading > Blog Pages show at most:" is set at 30.

As I mentioned on this post, the best Aside Plugin seems to be Katesgasis' Sideblog, but it has unfortunately not been since 2006.

Limited User Info: A lot of other WP users out there wanna do this as well. I'd like to put more relevant fields for users, such as address, mobile numbers and so on. Drupal users know this is very easy with CCK + Views. I haven't visited this issue for a while though, so there may have been developments.

Postie: Postie is a plugin that allows you to publish posts via email. While WP hanoles that natively using (the very simple) wp-mail, Postie allows great flexibility such as category, author, subject, comments closed or comments open, and even set a delay from 1 day to 1 minute. It's terrific if you are, say, posting from the road, or like me, which needs to publish multiple posts to multiple blogs at any given time. It also allows for an automated system that will allow me to post rss feeds or emails from mailing list subscriptions. In other words, I don't have to login each time. Instead, I just send an email. It's wonderful.

It also has not been updated since 2005. Recent comments on the Postie page are mostly requests for updates and pledges of donations, but no go. I am unsure if Drupal has a direct solution to this problem, but for some reason I am confident I can either find one or hack one in.

EventCalendar RSS: For some reason the RSS feeds for the EventCalendar category (I named rather unimaginatively as 'events') RSS feed does not work, inspite of using the instructions here. Meanwhile, I've managed to get all RSS feeds for all categories (and all my blogs) to work properly, so in other words, I'm stumped yet again. This is frustrating as I really wanna do fancy things with my Events Feed - something that's been on my todo list for.. months I think.

Updating: Finally this is an issue that has to do more with blogging software per se rather than WP itself. I read an interview once of BoingBoing.net's owner saying that we shouldn't be afraid to update specific posts as necessary, even if they've been posted already (as opposed to making a whole new post, especially if the updates are merely incremental). The solution is to edit the post and write 'UPDATE:' or something like that, underneath. This isn't very elegant.

I wanna look for a better solution for situations such as those. The dates and permalinks to posts that have been updated remain same, so on the surface, there is no indication that it has been updated. Once a post has been updated and re-updated, it's RSS feeds, I believe, still shoot off to RSS readers, but they look like the same post (unless the subscriber of course, investigates to check if there's something new). Otherwise if they just look at the title and excerpt, it looks the same. There must be a better way.

Drupal things I can do in addition to resolving above issues:

A much better Shopping Cart: I've been bleeding for a better shopping cart than the handmade one I have. I am currently testing Drupal's Ubercart.

Forum: Drupal's simple forum is way better looking than phpbb. PhpBB, from which I trace my programming roots, is great, no doubt about it. But it also doesn't look very good imho, and aesthetics is important whilst dealing with my target audience (girls and moms). Besides, if I use Drupal's Forum, it can integrate with other services like the blogs, and can be turned into a service that I really wanna try (which shall remain secret because I don't want anyone preempting me).

In summary I basically wanna take my blogs to the next level, and convert them into full fledged, gloves are off, firing on all cylinders, WEBSITES. Featuring community abilities, membership, relevant user info, public and (membership only) private information and so on.

The blog ability will always be its main draw. Great Writing and Content is what makes really good terrific blogs in the first place. People love to read, learn and be entertained, and that's what blogs deliver. But once they're 'there', I wanna make them do other things as well, and WP falls short of that because that's not what it was designed for.

I think I'll do MomEx first. It's gone from being number 1 in its category at PhilTopBLogs to number 8, so it needs more help than the others.

I have reverted this to use WordPress Default, and am not using permalinks at the moment.

I am investigating the sql file and my (very few) plugins but I don't know if the issue is there. I think it may have to do with rules for Lighttpd. Using lighty has been a struggle really, especially when you encounter errors, because at the back of my mind I often wonder if it has something to do with it.

And no I didn't make a backup, so SEO with this site is screwed. I'm glad this blog is only targetted towards friends and family. Otherwise if I had done this to Mom, Kikay or BallEx I'd be banging my head against the wall right now.

UPDATE!: Reported it here, and realized I was not alone in the issue, as there are reports of permalink errors worldwide on what I suppose are non - Apache webservers (lighttpd, IIS, etc.). I realize I have the option to restore this blog by downloading the most recent version (2.5.1) and getting the backup sql from yesterday, but I think I'll wait for a resolution instead. Besides this is just a personal blog, unlike the others.

Thank God for wp-backup which I programmed to email a sql backup copy to my gmail everyday. Of course I auto-archived it on Gmail, so I totally forgotten about it. Isn't it great when things just work?

As for WordPress 2.6, this issue looks like its on its way to becoming as bad as the categories to tags issue that went unresolved a few versions ago. I'm glad it's not a security update because damn, I can't update all my blogs until this error gets resolved.

UPDATE AGAIN!

As of this post, you merely need to go to Settings > Permalinks then enter the word 'Category' at the 'Category Base' and 'Tag' at the 'Tag Base' like this:

and Voila! Fixed. Super thanks again to Otto, for consistently saving the ass of bloggers all over (including mine) consistently for years (yes years).

Won't be updating the other sites yet though. I gotta wait till everything gets resolved first before I commit the other blogs. Downtime with those things gives me high blood pressure, dizzy spells, panic attacks, demonic visualizations, end of the world cataclysmic visions and rheumatism.

using this code:

<a href="{commenterurl}" target="new"><span class="stats"><strong>{commenter}</strong></span></a> on <a href="{url}"><strong>{title}</strong></a> <a href="{commenturl}" rel="bookmark" title="{commentdate} at {commenttime}">: <em>{commentsnippet:50}</em>...</a><br><br>

Then added gravatars where it showed up like this:

using this code:

{gravatar:32}<a href="{commenterurl}" target="new"><span class="stats"><strong>{commenter}</strong></span></a> on <a href="{url}"><strong>{title}</strong></a> <a href="{commenturl}" rel="bookmark" title="{commentdate} at {commenttime}">: <em>{commentsnippet:50}</em>...</a><br><br>

but I couldn't align it properly, so I resorted to good ol' tables, resulting in this:

using this code:

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="4"><tr><td valign="middle">{gravatar:32}</td><td><a href="{commenterurl}" target="new"><span class="stats"><strong>{commenter}</strong> </span></a> on <a href="{url}"><strong>{title} ({commentcount:no comments:comment:comments})</strong></a> <a href="{commenturl}" rel="bookmark" title="{commentdate} at {commenttime}">:</td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2"><em>{commentsnippet:50}</em>...</a><br><br></td></tr></table>

and if you noticed, added the total number of comments per post as well. There's a whole shiteload of switches and options on the Plugin Author's site, guaranteeing hours of happy geekiness that promises to rob me of a life.

here's how it looks like on KE:

Must.Resist.More.Tinkering.

Anyway, am writing here my thoughts on the 3 plugins that I tried for this purpose. Am doing so to remember them and possibly help others save time. Who knows, I might actually get the energy to write my own plug in after all this mucking about. I imagine a lot of people would appreciate it, and besides there's thankfully no need for javascript, just php extracting from mysql in a specific way. The usual stuff.

asideshop - most full featured but does not allow for posts on sidebar.

sideblog - shows much promise but does not support wp 2.5.1

miniposts2 - works great but does not allow for categories. Posts that end up on the sidebar are selected via a 'this is a minipost' button on WordPress' write page. I want whole categories to show up on my sidebar separately. This one will not differentiate by category.

I've basically narrowed my issue down to WordPress' ability to count posts. I need to figure out how that works and learn how to use < ?php rewind_posts(); ?> properly to make it restart each time. I'll get it right soon enough.

Anyway, I'll park this baby for the day. Time to go to Alabang and watch SATC with The Jill.

See I was trying to get the valid XML feed for a particular Tag or Category from this blog, a process I've instigated on PLUG's mailing list, so that the PLUG website can aggregate feeds tagged as 'plug' or 'open source' or 'foss' voluntarily submitted by its (currently 130+ strong) membership.

The problem was when I try to get the feed URL, for example:

http://www.lefthandedlayup.com/index.php/tag/plug/feed

I get this error:

XML Parsing Error: xml declaration not at start of external entity
Location: http://www.lefthandedlayup.com/index.php/tag/plug/feed
Line Number 2, Column 1:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
^

After weeks of searching and asking at the WordPress Forums to no avail, I've finally tried validating at Feedvalidator, which recommended amongst other things, I check my wp-rss2.php.

And there I found it. What looks like this:

should be like this:

In short, remove the spaces on line #9 on your wp-rss2.php. Now it's validating. Check it here.

Can't wait to apply it on the other sites. Basketball Exchange, in particular, has got XML errors up the wazoo.

Can I just say, WHEEEEWWWWWWW!

What I was working on needed a new db installed and I foolishly created one that was too similarly named to ballex's DB. I made a few mistakes installing it so I decided to scratch it and start over by deleting the DB and - guess what - I deleted ballex's instead. I definitely heard an audible gasp for air when I realized what I did.

Thank GOD I have Wp-backup, because if I didn't I don't know how I'd face the mirror everyday. We put in pure blood and guts in that thing, and to just delete it oh so casually would absolutely just kill us.

Nyway enough drama. I'm going for a walk out. I'm still not 100% after my bout with the flu, but I'll be ok by tomorrow for sure. Oh, and I'm setting my backups to DAILY this time.

.20 a minute for quality advice on your computer, networking, web development, tweaking wordpress and photoshop! San ka pa?!

Seriously, people who can communicate well and who have skills in Astrology and Spiritual, Business and Finance, Creative Services (?), Coaching and Tutoring, Relationships, Sports and Others should maybe look into this. Kinda like a single person, work at home, DIY call - center.

Yep, tailor made for Pinoys. Cool.

skype id: ghmercado

At any rate, further investigation (highly recommended everytime a new release of anything - drupal, phpbb, etc., comes out), has shown an easier way.

It's all, as always, on the WP Blog. Apparently most of the hullabaloo has to do with, to quote, an "XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow a user to edit posts of other users on that blog", assuming you allow registration. Ergo, merely replacing the xmlprc.php file will suffice! Here's the link to that.

Like most open source software, WordPress updates by increments and releases pending the severity of the issue. Hence, investigating the reason for the upgrade is important. In this case, I only allow registration on one of my blogs, so this upgrade is waay important to that one but not so much to the others.

There are 3 other less serious upgrades, listed here. Ticket 3780 has to do with a gettext issue on 64bit systems using php5.2.1. I'm neither using a 64bit system nor php5.2.1 (i'm using 5.2.5). Ticket 5273 has to do with a registration email callout issue, and Ticket 5090 deals with a mysql table call from config.php, an issue on a plugin I've never heard of.

So all's well as long as I deal with the xmlrpc file. Yes, I know what I'm doing. I think.

UPDATE!!

Ok so it turns out the above-mentioned announcement post at the WP-Blog was waaay incomplete. As per the WordPress' own Forum Announcement, there are five files that have been changed, namely:

wp-includes/version.php
wp-includes/pluggable.php
wp-includes/gettext.php
wp-admin/install-helper.php

as well as the file I mentioned above:

xmlrpc.php

And so because I'm feeling up to it after a day's rest (got sick yesterday), here's a quick picture guide to replacing these files.

First, here's how it looks when WordPress says your files need updating:

View from WordPress' Dashboard

Here's how these files look after I downloaded and unzipped them on my Desktop from WordPress.org:

/wp-includes

/wp-admin

root wordpress folder

I use the FileZilla FTP Client, but you can use any.

Just drag from the left to right.

Upon discovering that there are already similarly named files existing in the same directory, all FTP programs will ask if you want to overwrite them. In this case, we're saying yes because we've got backups. But if you don't have a backup, you can rename the files about to be written over to another name (ex. xmlrpc.php-bak). That way if you screw things up, you can just delete the new file, rename the old file to its orig name and you should be back from where you started.

Here's how it looks all updated:

Voila!

It's taken me a long time to decide which free blogging place to use and although wordpress.com has its limitations, it's certainly less limited than blogspot and LJ. Or at least, as far as I know since the last time I checked, which has been awhile. Suffice it to say I'm not completely sold on staying here, and I do wanna check out the others, although it's time consuming and besides, it's just for a personal blog right?

Nah. You know what? Why don't I just go flat out and just say I'm lazy. Yeah that hit the nail on the head right there.

At any rate since I'm rambling here, I'll just make a quick mention of the fact that I'm happy I've finally gotten a hang of Drupal and it's companions CCK and Views. And you know what? The mere fact that I actually take time to mention such a thing is proof enough that dealing with Drupal is not a task for the weak, no sirree.

I've known 'the power of Drupal' for some time now, and have been quite aware of its success, but I swear to God learning how to develop a fairly ordinary site using it sometimes makes you wanna tear your hair out. But lo and behold, as of the latter part of last week I actually had something decent going for a client, and it looks like I'm pretty much on my way. Of course having said that some ginormous complex problem is gonna crop up that will stun me yet again, but I'm pretty confident now, at least more than in a long time since I've been trying to get it going.

In the meantime however, I'm almost sure I can answer near 90% of anything WordPress can throw at me. I know it sounds like hot air but it's true, and given the fact I run a whole bunch of WordPress sites means that I should be pretty good at it by now. And also, I'm just saying that to compare how difficult Drupal is, as compared to WordPress. I'm sure a lot of Drupal diehards are gonna wanna scalp me for saying that, but hey, it's true. It's very powerful true, but it's also very very difficult to customize and theme.

Many times I felt like just making the site from scratch but for some odd reason, I hung on. It might be because I like pain, but more likely it's because I think I kept finding something nice about it which is why I kept at it. Now that things are moving along I'm actually starting to think of new projects that I can do with it.

No, actually two. One has to do with a techie type site where I can post howto videos that deal with mostly webmaster subjects (and yes, I hope to include WordPress and Drupal howtos in there), hopefully to help keep people from having to spend a hell of a whole lot of time grappling with it like I did, and also because since Paypal has (somewhat) finally allowed incoming cash in, I wanna give the 'Donate' Paypal method a try. I think it might work.

And the other project has to do with a directory slash registry type of listing with a membership system that'll help people find a certain thing faster. Nope, no details yet, I don't wanna get that idea stolen. Besides, I really haven't gotten deep into the details of theming a Drupal site as well as I'd want it to look which means a look as far away from the ridiculously ugly geeky default themes it comes with. Yep I know I am once again stoking the ire of the Drupal faithful, but I challenge everyone other than the medically blind to say that the default themes are pretty. I mean seriously.