We lost a few features moving mhvlug.org from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, as modules just didn’t exist. One of the ones I missed the most was the Planet function provided by UD Planet. This was an extremely simple to use module that let you have an attractive Planet (a collection of user blogs) on your Drupal site. The original authors of the module have long since gone inactive. So this past weekend I decided to just port it to D7 and be done with it. It took about 8 hours, and now we have Easy Planet!

Easy Planet 1.1 is now out. This is a straight port of UD Planet to D7. The only functionality which isn’t there is the disabling of aggregator menu items, which I’m not convinced was a good idea in the first place. It’s live on http://mhvlug.org/planet, for anyone that wants to see what it looks like.

One of the most important things to me was smooth transition from UD Planet installation. Because mhvlug.org was a D6 -> D7 migration, I still had udplanet tables and settings in my database. I wanted the experience of easyplanet to be: turn it on, all your stuff is back. I managed to get it there last night, so I’d be extremely interested in others that are moving from UD Planet -> Easy Planet to make sure it’s as seamless for them.

For more info, and to download the code, check out the project site.