My New Baby

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pcorbett's picture

Hi Everyone,

A while back I had presented my work with the Adams 12 Five Star School district in Thornton. Well, in addition to the individual school sites I shared with you, I have now successfully converted our entire district site to Drupal 5 running on SQL Server. While it's not part of core (yet), it works, and I hope to help gather support and organize the effort that eventually gets alternative DBs into core (maybe D7). I've outlined everything on our Drupalcon showcase/contest page.

I've also proposed a Drupal & SQL Server session - I haven't been notified that it will be part of the schedule yet.

Any feedback is much appreciated!

Thanks,

Patrick

Comments

Very Exciting! Always great

vordude's picture

Very Exciting!

Always great to see the flexibility of Drupal in action.

When you demoed this awhile back I think I remember remember you saying that with every Security update of Drupal core, you had to make many changes-- Is that still the case, or am I crazy...

With security updates I can

pcorbett's picture

With security updates I can usually just apply them no problem, but with Drupal 6, for example, it would take a lot of re-fitting to get it to run on SQL Server (the way I have it set up anyway). Hence my desire to get all of this into core.

Given that D6 has been

gregnostic's picture

Given that D6 has been released and it won't have any major features added to it like further DB abstraction (beyond the Schema API, etc. that's already in D6), you're looking at D7 before anything makes it into core. And, like I mentioned in my previous message, the PDO changes are well under way. But we'll have to wait to see if a data abstraction layer makes it into D7 as well. (Here's hoping!) You'll most likely need to keep doing things the way you've been doing them if you plan to upgrade to D6.

D7 and alternative databases

gregnostic's picture

Just so you know, your wish for getting more DB support in Drupal 7 is already being fulfilled. chx and Crell are currently working on getting Drupal working on PDO. And apparently work is progressing quite well.

PDO only abstracts away data connections, though, so this doesn't solve any inconsistencies with various database platforms by itself. That's where Doctrine comes in; there seems to be some interest in using Doctrine (or something similar) as an ORM, which will provide a data abstraction layer (which has support for several DBs, including MS SQL).

Assuming the Drupal community is OK with using an ORM, Doctrine seems very promising and its developers are willing to cross-license it to make it compatible with Drupal's GPL-only policy (and let's not derail this conversation with more talk about Drupal CVS policies, please). In fact, they've already created a contributed module for it.

It's still too early to know exactly what the situation will look like for D7, but we'll definitely be running on PDO at the very least and possibly on Doctrine.

I, for one, am looking forward to these changes.

We're in your district!

mushinspace's picture

You gotta love it when your own school district is doin' the Drupal!

Thanks Patrick!

Nice Site!

betsy's picture

Patrick, the Adams 12 site is really impressive -- very friendly design and it loads quickly. I also think you did a great job with the navigation. It's a wonderful example of "real world" Drupal. Kudos!!

Thanks for the feedback!

pcorbett's picture

Thanks for the feedback! Honestly, I thought the site was kinda slow - but, if it's fast for you, that's all that matters :)

What theme is that you are using?

pcoughlin's picture

What theme is that you are using?

I like the site ... Paul

We started with the

pcorbett's picture

We started with the BlueBreeze theme, but have modified it quite extensively since then. But, a lot of the smaller things like table themes and font choices were mostly left as they were in BlueBreeze.