Speech Freer: Working Under PHP safe_mode

So I’ve mentioned I’d really like to migrate from WordPress to Drupal, for a number of reasons. One of those reasons was that my WordPress has, over time, become gunked up with errors about write access that I kind of understand but have been unable to resolve. Particularly, the awesome automatic updating of WordPress and its plugins had ceased to work, and every update had to be applied manually, which was never going to happen. I was hoping starting from scratch with Drupal would let me keep everything running smoothly.

However in trying to fix a similar issue with my new Drupal install, I can across a post detailing a solution for How to Get WordPress Working Under PHP safe_mode on NearlyFreeSpeech.net, and believe it or not it works. Thank you, Sarah Pin! It’s a long process written out, but really just SSH and 4 shell commands to change the group of everything to web rather than my account. This allows WordPress scripts to write to the server, and hence allows automatic updates. The name of the site, “I Am Completely Serious“, inspired some confidence that I might just be able to fix this mess, and I’m so happy with the results that I’m definitely reconsidering the value of switching to Drupal.

Now the main drawcard of Drupal is the integrated forum module which, while not as full-featured as say phpBB, is plenty good enough for me to offer simple support, and integrates natively with the Drupal user database. In addition, I like the way Drupal is engineered; it’s a programmer’s CMS. Everything is extremely decoupled and customisable, and although that may not add much to the site itself, I suspect it would be more extensible in the future. WordPress is positively rigid in comparison. Finally, I’d just like to learn Drupal for future use, so what better place to start.

One last thing, you’ll notice the theme of Piemaster.net has changed as well. I was so eager to update everything that I didn’t really consider the consequences. The Mystique theme I was using had been customised a bit, and it turns out that since my last update a while back a bunch of features were removed and moved to “Mystique 3+”, leaving the site a bit of a mess. Reverting to the WordPress default theme Twenty Eleven is quite serviceable for now, however.

So in conclusion, I’m actually pretty happy with WordPress for the minute now that it’s all smooth sailing again. Migrating to Drupal is possible (I’ve more or less done it locally), but inevitably hits a few snags. The menus need to be reconstructed, the themes aren’t very pretty, users will need to re-register (not that there really is any atm), etc. I will get around to it, but maybe not just yet.