Simulistics

I logged out to see how the site was looking to anonymous vistors and a very small amount of looking around had me swamped in blog entries about developing the site so I've installed the Added taxonomy access module (see blog entry). If blog entries are tagged with sitedev they are hidden from all but administrators (actually other roles are denied  access and any new roles (groups) will have to  have their  access  configured).

Any problems?

Drupal has built in access control for content types but we need finer control.

The first use is to solve the following problem. All blog entries (a content type) are viewable by all in the default system but we don't really want our site development blog entries cluttering up vistors view of the site. Access has been denied to all but administrators to view blog entries tagged with sitedev.

Taxonomy access module

Access control for user roles based on taxonomy categories (vocabulary, terms).

I've started implementing the model catalogue.

Added a free form category for tagging models

We can use this for selecting groups of models.

Added a new Content type

I created a category called Blog tags, to allow us to tag blogs. It's identical to Model tags as far as I can see, so maybe there should only be one tags category that include both content types.

I used the alias function to point "News" in the menu to /news, as opposed to at taxonomy/term/3. We'll be able to use this to keep all links from previous site valid, though putting them all in manually might take a while.

Just so I was familiar with the process of installing drupal, I set it up on my home machine. I was wondering why I couldn't enable clean URLs in Home > Administer > Site configuration > clean URLs, and found out that URL rewriting had to be enabled in apache, and this is one way of enabling URL rewrites. However, this required me to do some fiddling with apache2.conf, so I needed root access to do this. There are other ways of enabling it though and maybe we could use one of these on the simulistics host.

The wysiwg editor requires that its html output is not filtered (unsuprisingly) and  having the original default of safe html broke the wysiwyg, see my blog entry "WYSIWYG edited pages have no new lines".

Full html is now the default input format BUT only Administrators may use it so ordinary users wysiwyg editing is probably still broken.

We need to consider the security issue. Mark do you fancy evaluating that?

I've installed the view module to enable us to format collections of pages as we want. This includes "blocks" so it should enable a sidebar display of recent news.

Other use, present lists of

Created a News category for  stories  (articles)

• (I'm not sure of any real reason to use a Story topic rather than an ordinary Page.)
• All the News stories can then be found by clicking on the News link in the Categories > Articles type page under Administration. I noted the URL it sent me to.

Added News menu item and linked it to the above noted URL.

Todo:

• Make a side bar with just titles.