My journey to proficiency with Drupal 7 took a sharp turn today, when I decided I would add some new features to this blog. I will use the Taxonomy feature, a module in D6 but built into Core in D7, to tag posts so that people who don’t want to read about Drupal can easily avoid those posts. I created the taxonomy, which I named Blog Subjects, and added Drupal, Melanoma, and Journalism as terms. Easy – so far so good!

I was going to write about melanoma – my preoccupation these days – and start to tell our story, or at least my perspective on it. Even before I started writing, though, I thought it would be good to have the ability to tell that story, for the time being, to just the people I’m writing it for – in other words, not make it available to the entire WWW. In D6 you do that by using a module called Node Access, which gives authorized users a Grant tab allowing them to restrict access on a node-by-node basis.

Sharp turn – because the Node Access module is not yet ready for prime time in D7! I took it for granted that I would have all the functionality on this new site that I have on my other Drupal sites. I discovered that an alpha version of the module is available for D7 but it’s not recommended for production sites. Perhaps there’s a way to do this using core functions of D7, but if so it’s not intuitive.

I have two options –

·        forget about it and brave the public, or at least write for a while and see who pays attention; or

·        find a work-around that will allow me to restrict access to some subjects I address in this blog.

For the moment, I’m looking for a work-around. Soon, I’ll get around to writing about melanoma.

Now, I'm off to figure out how to apply a taxonomy to my blog posts. I hope you'll see the results of that quest soon.