Status-Q

The BBC's iPlayer is a truly wonderful thing, as I have mentioned before.

In general, the content is only available in the UK, in the same way that Hulu is only in the US, but it gives those of us who pay a BBC licence fee access to everything on the Beeb's now numerous channels from the last week. And with the iPlayer Download options, you can download it to your machine and watch it for up to 30 days. This used to involve a Windows-only binary, but now you can click a link to be an iPlayer Labs tester and iPlayer items will automatically gain a 'download' option, which makes use of an Adobe Air-based application, meaning that it works on Macs and Linux too.

I've only just discovered this download facility, though. Before that, on our recent trip to Paris, I was surprised to discover that the free wifi in our little hotel was attached to rather a good internet connection. I logged into my home Linux machine and did a little magic which allowed me to persuade iPlayer that I was still in the UK, and we had some happy evenings watching very high quality content, including episodes we might otherwise have missed of the rather fun ghost story Crooked House.

Catch, or download, the omnibus edition while it's still there...

I've spent today converting the old Ndiyo site, which used Plone as the CMS, into Drupal.

Plone was very cool when we set the site up many years ago, but it's quite quirky, and very heavy on memory usage. On a dedicated machine this is not a problem, but when I've been setting up sites on a shared server, I can run rather a large number of Drupal sites in the RAM required for one Plone installation. With hosting services like the excellent Webfaction, there's a pretty direct motivation to switch. One Plone site needs more than the base-level service and so will cost you more per month than several Drupal sites.

Besides, Drupal is wonderful. I've investigated many CMSes over the years and I've fallen in love with Drupal. It's beautifully designed, despite the fact that it's written in PHP, which for me is a bit like admitting that I like The Matrix even though it stars Keanu Reeves.

Drupal's power is not immediately apparent, but if you're willing to put some time into it, listen to the podcasts, Google for the screencasts, explore the contributed modules (of which there are now thousands), your effort will be repaid. I was very pleased with how quickly I got Rose's new site up and running, for example.

Anyway, all of that is a long introduction to the fact that I wrote a Python script which helped me convert Plone content into Drupal content and I've posted it on qandr.org in case it's useful to anyone.