Discover Doug

I am in the process of working out the best way of hosting a Drupal forum on my food allergy website. This sounds easy, but there are a few technical issues to overcome.

I don’t want a totally open public forum, or I’ll get spammed to death! And I don’t want a totally closed forum - I do want anyone with something valid to contribute to be able to join up. And I don’t want to spend all my time administering it either.

I found a good article about setting up forums in Drupal which looks very helpful. It suggests a few modules to control access to forums.

I’ll post again when I get the forum up and running, and explain what I did and how it all went.

Have you ever set an objective for yourself, but then never really bothered to meet it out of pretty much shear laziness? You are not alone!

I do it quite often, mostly because I have so many things I would like to do, and that I think are useful and important, but there just isn’t enough time for them all, there just isn’t!

So a friend of mine, Justin, came up with this great idea for a website, called GoalPosting, where you can publicly proclaim the goals you are setting for yourself. He actually got the idea from another friend of mine, Scotty, on another forum about how to drive traffic to your website. The actual thread for the idea is called I Publicly challenge myself too “Blank” by “Date”. That was a good idea, and people did use it, but it is part of a larger forum. Justin’s forum is about goal setting, and goal setting only.

You can read my first goal on the goal setting site if you like. And by the way, posting it publicly is helping me, otherwise I’d have got lazy and sold myself short. I’ve not yet met my goal, but I have till the end of March ‘07 to reach it and I am more than half way there!

For those of you who wanted to get the free tickets to a wealth-building seminar that I was offering on this website a while back, you will be happy that I once again have have more give away! The bad news is that some dates have been sold out and others are in extremely short supply. With any luck, the dates and locations affected are not the ones you wanted to attend!

To find out more about money and what you can do about it, click here.

It is a curious oversight in the design of Drupal, that you can not directly control block visibility for the administrator by configuring the block.

The easiest way to hide a block when logged in as administrator, is to follow a modified version of the instructions on the Drupal site explaining the advanced use of block visibility.

This requires PHP, but you don’t actually have to know anything about PHP, just copy and paste the code below, as instructed. (View entire article to see code).

First, you have to set up the block so it will use the PHP code to decide if the block should be visible or not.

Then, you have to copy the code below into the pages field in the Show block on specific pages section.

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When I set up my allergy information website in January, I decided to use the latest version of Drupal, then just released. In deciding between WordPress or Drupal, I chose Drupal over WordPress, because I want the website to be much more than a blog. In this I am not disappointed - when I get the time, I’ll write more about the difference between the two content management systems - they each have their strong points.

Having chosen Drupal, I then had the choice of installing the tried and true 4.7.6, with its plethora of modules, or the latest and greatest Drupal version 5.1, with rather fewer modules available.

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I am starting a new series of food allergy profiles on my allergy information website. The plan is to create a series of briefs about each country, indicating the staple foods (which are therefore hard to avoid if you can’t eat them), what foods are easy to avoid (great place to go if you can’t eat those foods) and what the challenges are for each country.

To start with, I plan to cover as many countries as I can with any kind of accuracy or authority. I will then work on expanding what I have, or creating a new section with more detail