When I’m developing something, I like to split out related functionality into modules or libraries whenever I see the opportunity, so that I can share code between projects and generally promote re-use.

Doing this presents a number of interesting challenges, one of which is how to manage changes to these shared modules.

If I have three projects using some module, I can either choose to have them all link to the same version of the module on my disk, or I can give each project its own copy.

On the face of it, linking to the same version sounds like the way to go. After all, we’re sharing right? If we make a fix to the shared module, we want to get it in all projects don’t we?

Well, sort of, but not really. It’s how I used to do it, but not any more, and I’ll explain why in a moment.

For some as-yet-unknown reason, anonymous comments don’t seem to be working on my installation of Drupal 6. Which is a bit of a pain in the arse.

I’ll try to figure it out, but for now, if you want to comment on a post, you’ll have to register (which is quite safe - I don’t use the email addresses or do anything else nasty with your data).

Update

I’ve worked out what was going on - somehow my anonymous user had got removed during my upgrade and server migration.

These Drupal threads helped:

• http://drupal.org/node/243423
• http://drupal.org/node/501286

The solution was just hack the users table manually and add back a user with uid = 0. Scary!

Right, hopefully I’ve finished with upgrading my server and this website is back in the proper place.

If you notice any broken links, please let me know…

If you’re noticing that some content on www.elegantchaos.com keeps appearing and disappearing mysteriously, it’s because I’m switching back and forth between the original version and the new Drupal 6 version which is running on an old (and slow) server.

Apologies if this confuses your rss news reader! Eventually I’ll finalise the update and switch over permanently to Drupal 6, at which point it will go onto my proper server and things will stop changing!

As an experiment, I’ve ported this site across to Drupal 6.

The new version of the site is running on a test server at the moment, so you might notice a bit of a drop in performance, and one or two old links may be missing since I’ve not bothered to copy the old static content over yet.

Hopefully though, the basic stuff will work. I’m also hoping that moving to Drupal 6 will allow me to re-enable comments, and to add various other bits of functionality.

If you notice anything that seems to have gone badly astray, give me a yell!