User login

Navigation

You are here

iMechanica has just upgraded to Drupal 5. Any issues?

Zhigang Suo's picture

After testing for some time, Lesley Lam has just upgraded iMechanica to Drupal 5.  She has tried to make every function exactly the same as before, so that users should not see any abrupt changes.  If you do find any unfamiliar behavior of the new version, please leave a comment below.

Comments

Henry Tan's picture

Thanks for making iMechanica a comfortable place for us.

Zhigang,

Does that mean that we now have DruTeX installed?   If it has been installed, can we get some instructions on what tags to use for LaTeX equations?

If you haven't been able to install it yet, there are some pointers at http://drupal.org/node/111980.

Biswajit

Zhigang Suo's picture

We have not added any new module yet.  We will first make sure Drupal 5 is OK, and then consider installing new modules.  Also, before we install any new module, we will do some testing in iMechLab .  I'll contact you for help when we get around to do that.

Teng Li's picture

If you're a Firefox user, you may notice that the color scheme in the header and the channels seems changed (e.g., cyan-like font color, not very visible in a blue background).

Actually, the default color scheme is not changed, and you can get back to the previous color scheme by doing the following trick: click through all links
in the header and the channels, then shut down firefox and restart. At least this works for my Firefox). The mismatch color scheme has not been experienced in Microsoft IE. 

Thanks Mogadalai Gururajan for raising the concern.

Please report any bugs and/or share your tips in using Drupal 5-powered iMechanica by leaving comments here. Thanks.

Xiao Hu Liu's picture

I notice some difference in iMechanica. It used to have the useful "Popular for today" and "All time polpular" items in the left column but they disappear now. Do you also see the same problem? Can they be brought back?

Thanks!

Zhigang Suo's picture

With the old edition of Drupal, Firefox 2 provides inline spelling check when I write a post or a comment.  Now Firefox inline spelling check stops working.  This is not an urgent issue, but I'd like to learn why.

MichelleLOyen's picture

I had serious problems trying to write a post on my Mac with Camino; the links including "promote to the front page" were inactive, I could not paste text from an email, and now at least on my machine the post only appears as a headline on the front page requiring me to click "read more" in order to see any of the text even though the whole post is only a few lines and would normally appear in its entirety.  I ended up having to go back to Safari to get the post online (so I could paste the info from a PoroNet email announcement) but this iexperience was, at least from my perspective on the Mac, a huge slide downwards from what was running yesterday.  Everything I click on seems to take forever to load as well.  The text editor looks like Microsoft Office with its amazing and ever growing feature bloat instead of the nice, streamlined, functional interface that was here yesterday.

Michelle,

  I'm posting this on a Mac with Camino and don't appear to be seeing the same problems you are.  Maybe try restarting the browser?  I also did just download Camino, so perhaps the most recent version is better suited?

MichelleLOyen's picture

John: it's as though the site has been slowly evolving since it was updated such that each time I've looked at it it's been slightly better; the problems I was having earlier seem to be mostly not here now!  But you're right that I am still on Camino 1 and should upgrade!

That said, I maintain that this new interface for typing has waaaay too many buttons and features.  I really do not need something with complexity akin to MS Word to write a few lines of hypertext... What is all this "functionality" doing to bandwidth? 

Zhigang Suo's picture

The Word-style editor iMechanica has been using is a module called TinyMCE.  The module is added so that a user knowing no HTML can format the text.  I have also noted that it behaved differently from the previous version.   Teng Li is more familiar with the module, and I have asked him to take a look at it.  Here are a few problems I have encountered:

  • When I used Firefox to post, Firefox  automatically provided inline spelling check.  Now there is no spelling check.
  • I used to be able to turn off TinyMCE, so that I can embed a YouTube video (See Teng's instrictruction).  Now I cannot turn it off.
  • I recall that, as an administrator, I could select some buttons before for the site.  But I cannot find a way to do it now.

I can post entries now, so that none of the probelms are urgent.

Please feel free to add your questions and concerns as comments.  We may not be able get to them right away, but we will eventually.

Teng Li's picture

To address the concerns Zhigang raised: 

  • Many others Drupal 5 users encounter the same problem of no Firefox spelling check.  Spelling check modules for Drupal 5 are being developed by Drupal contributors. 
  • Good news! Now you don't need to turn off TinyMCE to embed a video. I just wrote a new, simplified instruction for video posting in iMechanica. I hope this new instruction will allow more iMechanicians starting to post videos.
  • The new TinyMCE module allow us to choose from three modes: Full, Compact and Simple.  The current setting for iMechanica is Compact, which enables most features. I haven't found a way to select buttons in the toolbar, and will look into this further.  Some buttons don't work very well, but I guess most people usually use only a few of them, such as, hyperlink, bullet, bold, etc. 
Subscribe to Comments for "iMechanica has just upgraded to Drupal 5.  Any issues?"

Recent comments

More comments

Syndicate

Subscribe to Syndicate