CHLA/ABSC has had a Facebook group page for a few years now.  Now you can also follow us on Twitter @chlaabsc.

I've been experimenting with linking all of this up, so now, thanks to TwitterFeed, the web site's RSS feed is posting to Twitter, and with the Facebook application RSS Graffiti, the feed should also be hitting the group's Facebook wall.

Part of the point of this post is to test all of that!

Tim

Update: Sunday afternoon

Looks like the domain name servers have been updated.  Now working on restoring email forwards, and distribution lists.  Like packing, when travelling, I'm always relieved to figure out what one thing I invariably forgot when I get to my destination.  Of course I forgot at least one thing in this whole operation too.  I forgot to get the email distribution lists off the old host before the domain change happened.  Oh well, I can reconstruct those...  Hope that was the worst of it!  (yes, I'm touching wood!)

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Apologies folks, but it seems we're having a problem with PDF files from the site not loading properly with Firefox (IE and Safari seem to work fine).
Until I can figure this out, you can get around it by right-clicking on the link to a document and saving it on your machine. It appears that it will save with a ".part" extension. If you change the extension to ".pdf" the file should work okay.
Any ideas anybody? I'm coming up empty here...
Tim

With the establishment of the Leadership Interest Group, a new page (under "Chapters and Community") and forum for the group have been created.

CHLA-ABSC is happy to announce that we are now hosting the CHIPIG (Consumer Health Information Providers Interest Group) web site at chla-absc.ca.

The chipig.ca domain will continue to exist, but until we work out some domain forwarding issues, you can find CHIPIG at http://www.chla-absc.ca/chipig/

Tim

As a number of you pointed out to me at the end of the week, whenever you tried to log into the site, it just put you back at the home page, or log in screen, but didn't actually log you in.

Okay, it's done. I just hope it worked!
This afternoon, Sunday, May 6, I imported the information for all of the current members, and many former members of the association. You all should have received a personalized email telling you what was going on and giving you instructions on how to log in and change your password.

1. Enable collapsing menus
2. Rebuild Navigation menus properly with multilingual options/translations
3. Add member only content back to Drupal file system
4. Figure out Taxonomies and the Taxonomy Access Control Module
5. Import member database information
6. Coordinate with / train Office staff to be able to add/change users
7. Customize Error (file not found) pages

The only issue with using a CMS vs. a WYSIWYG editor/site mangement tool is the loss of formatting control. Drupal will understand inserted html tags in postings when they're being created, but I don't really expect any potential contributors to the site to know HTML...
Luckily, another 3rd part module - TinyMCE - gives a nice solution, with formatting buttons that you would see in a text editor like Word...

Found a 3rd party module for importing users from a CSV file. Managed to export the users table from the old members only section, and have successfully imported all the board members. Will have to see what their reactions were to the auto-generated emails...
Weird thing is, it seems to have messed up the menuing. I think I may have to revisit how I built the navigation menus. There goes another day!

Why do all these systems insist on utilizing national flags to represent language!?!??!
The two official languages of Canada are French and English - never mind the fact that here in Toronto, both are nearing minority status!
Yet, my only options for language icons are the Union Jack, and the flag of France. Not bloody likely!

Wondering what to tackle next... Now we've got a lovely bilingual shell for the site, but most of the content is still sitting in old static pages...
I guess the obvious choice is to start with those things that link directly from the Navigation menu. Top level items first or just start at the beginning and churn through it... Hmmm... I think I'll try to find a better text editor module to install before I start converting content big time... Think I'll wait until I start that to implement the Navigation menu changes suggested by the Board as well.

Manged to create new page items in both languages that have the list of links to old news items that formed the bulk of the home pages. So, I've deleted the links to indexe and indexf from the Drupal navigation menu. I guess I should go into the old static site template and update the "English" and "Francais" links to the new Drupal context...
Mabye while I'm doing that, I'll work in some of the suggestions the Board made on the Navigation scheme...
Tim

I feel like such a doofus! All this time, I've been struggling with the Internationalization module for Drupal in order to create a a bilingual site. I enabled the French language, I created a French Navigation menu, I created French and English blocks for the promotional stuff you see on the right. I even finally figured out that in order to create the site information parameters (logo, mission, footers) in both languages, I just needed to switch what language I was working in and then change them appropriately.

Problems with the "Chameleon" template for Drupal: didn't like the link colours, and the author and date on postings wasn't showing up.
For the colours issue, I had to go into the theme's CSS files directly and change them. Thing was, it didn't seem to work, so I gave up in frustration. Then my new colours magically appeared on the French pages before I went to bed last night. English pages were fine when I got up this morning. Bloody caching!

I'm re-introducing the blog, more for my own need to keep track of what I'm doing with Drupal, than anything else. If you're reading this, then hopefully it's useful for you too. I won't clutter the homepage with this stuff (except for this post), so if you want to read more, click the "webmaster's blog" or "Le blog de webmaster" link below.
Tim