Posted by Mokey on November 13, 2013 at 9:46pm
I am a programmer from way back before the internet was big. I dipped my feet back into the water a couple of years ago, creating a D6 website for a local non-profit. The site uses a lot of modules, but no custom code (though it could certainly use it!). I'm trying to upgrade to D7 before writing my own modules, and am getting very frustrated with the process.
I've posted a specific question about admin_menu on drupal.org here: https://drupal.org/node/2117203 with no responses. I was hoping to connect with the local community to see if anyone can help me through the process.
My brother is trying to talk me into switching over to Ruby on Rails, but I don't want to give up yet.
Comments
It's kind of hard to suggest
It's kind of hard to suggest a potential fix for that problem without seeing under the hood.
The basic things to do are clear the caches and uninstall and reinstall the module, since this is an add-on module that doesn't have much of it's own configuration (from my understanding of it). It shouldn't be doing this, but it is.
A lot of the challenge with Drupal is that once you start getting your hands dirty, things can get very complicated and confusing and kind of arbitrary.
I'm in the middle of a Drupal project for a non-profit and I tried to save time by using OpenPublish (which is designed for this use case) but OpenPublish D7 was never finished and so I'm rethinking and needing to redo a lot of the core functionality in order to get it to meet my vision of the site. Wishing you best of luck with your endeavor, upgrades can be extra hard for Drupal. Have you ensured that all of the modules have upgrade paths for D7 ?
Robb
Hey Mokey
Like Robb kind of mentioned, I would suggest maybe trying a distribution first and importing content using Backup and Migrate rather than trying a whole upgrade from scratch...unless your site is pretty complex. You'd know better than anyone else about that though.
Since D7 still has most all of the configuration in a relational database, you can get burned with weird peculiarities in the DB, and I figure most of the meat of any CMS website is the content. Also, in your specific case with menu order, it could be theme-related/CSS rules...
Other than Open Publish, Open Outreach is a Drupal distribution that keeps up with Drupal core security updates and is geared towards non-profits. The hosting company Pantheon actually lets you try out some distributions for free on a developer account.
As far as RoR goes, I'd say it'd make sense for you to consider using it for a web app, but I don't know why anyone would for a CMS type project. RoR just doesn't have a CMS with as extensive of functionality pre-built by the community. I've only seen Refinery CMS for RoR as a comparison, though, so let me know if I'm missing anything there.
-Alex
Or
Or if the site is pretty simple, dump data into XML files or CSV and import via feeds into a fresh Drupal 7 install (which has feeds).
https://drupal.org/project/feeds
There is some setup on the D6 and D7 sites, but if you are familiar w/ Drupal it can be done quickly for basic sites.
Drupal StackExchange
Thanks
Thanks for the replies.
I feel like my site is relatively simple, but in reality, it's not. It's for a homeschool co-op. We use the site to store information about each family. Each session, we can each offer classes, then we build a schedule from that, including listing all sorts of volunteer jobs. People can then sign up for classes and volunteer jobs, with some minimal error checking (that I would like to extend for our specific needs). We use ubercart for paying fees through paypal. We have a photo gallery (that is not working since I upgraded all modules to the latest 6.x releases). We're dealing with a slightly different set of roughly 100 people, four times a year.
We do a lot of stuff by hand that really should be automated, like adding events to the calendar when we start a new session, creating volunteer jobs and classes that happen every session, checking that no one has signed up for two classes in the same period, etc. Our user interface is also really lacking, since I've patched together a bunch of modules written for slightly different purposes than how I'm using them. I have all sorts of ideas for how to improve it, but limited time. Though I put the upgrade on hold to start writing my first module in D6, and it hasn't been as hard as I thought it might be.
I know I've cleared caches. I'm not sure I've actually uninstalled the module -- I just recently realized that removing a module from the directory is not the same as uninstalling it. I should try that. By stepping through the debugger, I got far enough to figure out that the structure of the menu is only built once. So, something about the upgrade has given me the wrong structure, but I couldn't figure out how to rebuild it since it's not just a simple cache. Hopefully uninstall/reinstall will do that.