Tuesday, 14. October 2008
Drupal 6.5 was released October 8th and I realized that I had missed a couple of releases. I installed the update and everything worked flawlessly.
Update: The blog API module still has an impedance mismatch between RSD and posting. It hands out “1″ in response to an RSD query but expects “blog” when posting. So once again I had to re-apply the RSD patch for the Blog API module.
Wednesday, 9. April 2008
Drupal 6.2 was released today. It addresses a security vulnerability that affects Drupal 6.x sites that have multiple users, as well as a variety of other bug fixes. I upgraded from 6.1 to 6.2 without difficulty. However, I did have to re-apply the RSD patch for the Blog API module.
Wednesday, 9. April 2008
If your blog is powered by Drupal you can blog images and videos from Flickr. This blog post was created with Flickr. First I found an image that was relevant, interesting and licensed under Creative Commons. I decided to use the image to the right which displays a graphical snapshot of the available Drupal modules. Then I clicked the 
button that appears above images along with the more familiar controls. That button sent me to a Flickr blog form where I typed the blog title and content. Then I posted the entry directly to this blog. (Once I had posted it I opened it with MarsEdit to polish it and add some additional images.)
If you want to try blogging from Flickr you need to make sure you have both the Blog and Blog API modules enabled and configured in Drupal. You can see what modules are enabled and enable or disable additional modules at Home
Saturday, 9. February 2008
Drupal 6.0 RC4 was released yesterday and I downloaded it and took it for a spin. The good news is that the problems I reported here and here have been fixed.
The bad news is that after installing it and running the update I could not post a new blog entry with MarsEdit 2. When I tried to post a test message I received this error dialog:
The problem is related to the “Blog ID” that is configured in MarsEdit's blog settings and the way Drupal handles that blog ID:
When MarsEdit auto-detects the blog ID it gets a value of “1″. For Drupal 6.0 RC3 and prior the blogapi.module was mapping the blog ID to a content type. A blog ID of “1″ mapped to a content type of “blog”. Starting with RC4 that mapping was removed. RC4 treats the blog ID and the content type as synonomous. This was causing the function _blogapi_validate_blogid to fail because it was trying to validate that the current user had permissions to publish a content type of “1″ but the content type should actually be “blog” instead.
The fix for this is to change the blog ID in MarsEdit to “blog” as shown here:
Changing the blog ID to “blog” allows posting and does not appear to have any negative side affects.
Update: Apparently the change was intentional in Drupal and the issue persists in versions 6.0 and 6.1. All of the functions in blogapi.module that need a blog ID are expecting a blog ID of “blog” now. Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software pointed out the the incorrect blog ID is being returned by Drupal's RSD function. This is causing any blogging software that uses RSD for auto-discovery to get the wrong blog ID which in turn causes the problems described earlier in this post. The blog ID is hardcoded to “1″ in blogapi.modules's RSD function. I submitted a patch to change the blog ID returned by the RSD function in blogapi.module to “blog” so that RSD auto-discovery will work correctly with MarsEdit and hopefully other blogging clients as well. You can also view and download the patch here.
