Sunday 3 February 2008

One of my reasons for creating the Verso site was to allow for discussions that aren’t strictly about the content of a particular chapter. For example, there was the “Why Matilda and Sela died” post in response to a comment of Devin’s — conversations that would get lost too easily among comments to a chapter, and which distract from the chapter itself. (Have you ever wanted to comment on a chapter, and by the time you read to the end of the previous comments, forgotten what you wanted to say? :-) )

However, this blog format has proven to be only a partial solution to the problem. It still requires me to create an “article” here before anyone can comment on it and a discussion can get started. That has been bothering me a bit lately, and Cassie recently suggested that I open a message-​​board for that purpose, which proved it “wasn’t just me”.

Also, at work there are rumblings about integrating some Drupal-​​based Web sites with some of our own custom applications, and I was looking for an excuse to get some Drupal experience beforehand. Preferably something fun.

So I slapped together a little site with a forum. My first experiment with Release Candidate 2 of Drupal 6 failed spectacularly after only 2 days, so I went at it again with Drupal 5. This version has held itself together for two weeks now, so I am feeling confident enough to announce it:

Lothere Forum with Gilded Theme

http://​www​.lothere​.com/​f​orum/

  • You can create a user account, though you don’t have to have an account to read or to comment — at least not until the comment spammers start showing up.
  • If you have an account you can also create new forum topics, if you have a particular question to ask me or everyone else, without waiting for me to create a new post first.
  • And you can create new polls… so the Team Araphel vs. Team Osh camps can now keep score. (Don’t worry — if you vote with your user account, you can always change your vote later if Araphel screws up again or does something charming again. ;-))

I consider the site still somewhat experimental, partly because I have no idea what use anyone is going to want to make of it, and partly because I am still learning Drupal. The Gilded theme, for example, still has a few holes in it, and there are bugs in the smiley module and elsewhere, but I am fairly confident it won’t spontaneously cripple itself again.

If I get to like the Drupal architecture, I may eventually move the story over there from Wordpress. There are some features I would like to have in the Lothere site that don’t come with out-​​of-​​the-​​box blog software. But for now it’s just for fun and, incidentally, my education. So come have fun! And help me learn. :-)