ARG! The silly cafe wifi disconnected as I posted this before. Apologies if it is already up!
But! If not here goes again.
Hey everyone,
My name's Pat Hussey and this is the first time I have used this forum and don't even know if this is the right place to be posting. Hope so!
I edit www.run-riot.com a london based events website. Think of us as an artier time out. We post events, blog, podcast and have 20,000 subscribers to our website. To cut a long story short us arty editors want to become more tech savvy with our site so we can make the changes we need for SEO and new features. Two years ago we had the site made by a pro web design company out of drupal but we're tired of having to go to them every time we need a change!
However our ignorance will terrify you! We know that the site is made from Drupal but we don't know what version! O dear :(
Right now we are in the middle of making changes to the site and want to change the tech to accomodate them. So here are a few questions.
1) Anyone know or can guess what version of Drupal our site is made from ?
2) Would there be any benefits to upgrading to the latest version? WOuld it give useful plugins or help SEO?
3) WOuld this be techinically difficult?
4) We have a selection of category pages for differnt kinds of events. Film, Art, Club, Music. I want to create twitterfeeds for eeach page but need to make them into RSS links. How can I do this?
5) OK THIS ONE KILLS US! Each time we upload an event the system makes a url for it- but it is a crappy, seo unfriendly url like this one http://www.run-riot.com/node/%203325
we have a 'url path setting' box on the dash that allows us to create better SEO friendly links like
run-riot.com/slut-boutique-at-the-queen-of-hoxton
BUT the site keeps the old crappy one too and switches between them randomly! How do we stop this and make the SEO link the only one?
WE HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS! and would love help. We give away tickets to all sorts of gigs, events and even cooler stuff like hotel comps.
Eventually we would love someone who could answer our questions and we could shove cool arty ticets etc at them in return for tech wisdom!
Much love
pat
Comments
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I sent you an email with some of your answers. The rest:
4) You can setup custom rss feeds with the http://drupal.org/project/views module.
5) node/* urls are the canonical urls drupal creates for all content. You can add the pathauto and token modules to automate this procedure as well as the http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect module for the redirects.
Hope that helps some...
First steps
1. You can easily see what version you are running if you go to your status page at run-riot.com/admin/reports/status.
2. Upgrading to the latest version is necessary because of security concerns. In addition you get bug fixes.
3. If you upgrade within your branch (e.g. from 6.9 to 6.14) you shouldn't have bigger problems. However if you never have done it before you definitly should try it on a test site first and you should do it by the instructions given in the handbook here at drupal.org and in the upgrade.txt file of your installation.
4. -perhaps later-
5. Check if you have the pathauto module installed.
thanks, updating and orientation
WF thank you so muc for getting back to me, you too DDDave!
really helpful and stuff to chew on.
I'm gonna take a look at all your suggestions and will know doubt be back here asking for advice.
Is there a good video or module on here that introduces the new user to basic Drupal use and features?
I need ot get orientated before I start I think
THANKYOU GUYS!
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Lots of great, free and pay, videos are available. See http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/videocasts for various lists of the free ones. Any video from mustardseedmedia is always good. Lots of good stuff over a lullabot.com as well.