The internal link converter would need to know about Drupal node addresses (WordPress: ‘?page_id=75′, Drupal: ‘/node/75′).

Being too busy with many site conversion however I did not get to mess with it until yesterday – facing a site that would have been heartbreaking to convert in to WordPress. We’ve taken a shine to Drupal around here – and as a content management system it beats WordPress paws-down. Most blogs are better off in WordPress actually, but sites needing content management and offering lots of different content really do better in Drupal.

So I patched up my code and added a couple custom APIs to Drupal and pulled the trigger to convert a client’s Manila site in to a Drupal site.

The result? All the content showed up on the Drupal site with all images served from new Drupal URLs placed as expected and all internal links converted to their new Drupal URLs.

I had to shut off certain aspects of the conversion – so Manila nav bars did not get converted and no Manila members got ported either. I got all the posts, stories, images and Gems. The rest has to be done by hand – which for medium to plus-size sites should not be too burdensome. So thats where I’ll leave it for now – head over to Weblogger.com if you need your Manila site converted to WordPress or Drupal (there must be tens of you!)

Contact forms running reCAPTCHA protection seem to fair pretty well at cutting spam, so I found a plugin by a nice chap called Deko Boko – Nice plugin and it seems to work fine, it’s just a shame the poor guy had to build the entire admin interface, posting catching and emailing mechanisms and finally tie in the reCAPTCHA support from scratch.

Looking to do the same thing on a Drupal site I manage the experience and process was quite different. Drupal Modules (think WP Plugins, but smarter) snap together like legos to form workflows that fit your needs. You can do things through the Drupal interface that would require PHP coding in WP.

First I enabled the Contact module, included in the base Drupal install. Then I downloaded a Contact Form Module which did not include the support of the specific reCAPTCHA scheme I desired, but had every other feature I was looking for.

Next I downloaded a Drupal specific reCAPTCHA module, and the base PHP library from the reCAPTCHA folks and deposited those files in their appropriate folders in my Drupal install.

WordPress does provide ways for developers to modify output and have certain actions triggered by WP functions, Drupal takes this much farther by setting up an environment that allows for Drupal Modules to modify the behavior of each other. This can shift the balance of power to the sys admins, advanced users who don’t quite know what they are doing with PHP and away from PHP savvy web developers.

Once I had the reCAPTCHA plugin set up and working – I used it’s interface from my Drupal admin area to select the form generated by the contact form module and shizzam – I put my peanut butter in your chocolate! The guy who wrote the contact form module did not need to add specific reCAPTCHA support to his module, and the reCAPTCHA module guy did not do anything special to allow the modification of the previous plugin to use reCAPTCHA. Neat huh?

If I were to describe a perfect family and living condition for Fiji it would fit her new home to a tee. She has another grey to play with in a great big yard and doting parents. Plus the dry climate in Reno will serve her well as she seemed a touch allergic to something in the air here.

Here is Fiji on the treadmill – with a special appearance by rising star Zoe.