I have just installed Drupal 6.0rc2 at Hearth.ws.

For quite some time now I have been meaning to set up an aggregator for all of the unrev.org web entities. I wanted to be able to have it all come together in one place. Not just that, the desire was to be able to clearly show the entire unrev.org entelechy on one page, dynamically.

Take that and add the ability to condense all those feeds into one, and a very powerful syndication mechanism emerges.

In toying with theme choices, I originally went with Splender. However, I found out that it didn't support "no sidebars", and the content stayed in the middle with blank spaces right and left where the blocks would be. So I switched over to Nista, another really simple, fast theme that allows content to fill in the sidebar area when no sidebars are displayed.

I chose not to add a single contributed module to keep it really light. (That said, I will install and use the Poormanscron module once it is updated to Drupal 6.) The purpose of the site is so straight forward, and the number of url aliases relatively minimal as they are limited to a single feed aggregator category and each feed, that Drupalers can get away with a nearly strictly core + theme instance of Drupal.

For other sites that I use to aggregate larger amounts of feeds in this way, I would sure like to have the Pathauto module take care of paths generated by the core Feed Aggregator module. This is something I must make a feature request for. I have wanted this since early versions of Drupal.

I am noticing some sweet upgrades to Drupal with the new version 6. The positioning of blocks is smooth as heck, editing menus is a breeze, heirarchy of vocabulary takes a fraction of the time it used to, some core lingo has been changed (access control -> permissions, news aggregator -> feed aggregator, categories -> taxonomy) and major update/upgrade support has been kicked into the system. I am particularly impressed by this last point, as the system itself keeps you up to date with key info about the Drupal version, modules, themes, translations, etc that you are working with.

Back to Hearth.ws (and Earth): Overall, it was a super-simple install, and now I just have to finish adding all the feeds from the many web entities unrev.org is currently upholding.