Get Inside the Loop

I got excited about Drupal 6 Distributions that promised profiles so you can have site installs offering news sites, church sites, etc. Well is more promise that actuality. I tested three distributions, a church site, newspaper site, and a club site. I was never able to get the church site to install. It failed install and I could not find any notes to get past the problems. The news site initially failed, but I was able to modify the php.ini files to allow more time and memory for the installation. The Innovation News Install Profile installed with roles for writer, editor, photographer, manager, edition manager all complete. I am modifying the taxonomy to use the site as a sample newsroom application. The club site was not a full install but rather a contributed module with additional modules. The core club module failed and was unable to install content types, seems it had a module called images that clashed with another also called images. Forum notes indicated I needed to create some additional fields under CCK to make it work. I chose instead to build a club-type site using fckeditor to handle editing and images. Note: If you a building a number of sites, once you get the fckeditor module installed with editor, you can save time by just copying that module to other installs.

Good news is that the Drupal is working toward improving the install profiles or distributions so that they can be used to custom sites. This would greatly aid others in using Drupal. Currently, Drupal 6 is like a giant jigsaw puzzle of core projects and modules that have to be combined to order to create a site with the features needed for a church site, newspaper site or member club site.
There is an announcement on Drupal.org that says that "when viewing the project page of an install profile" you will have the option of installing the modules with core or not and the list of modules will show the status of each module.
As I said, only one in three install profiles proved useful so I hope they do get the "install profiles", "project files" or "customized distributions" into some kind of useful format.

See all the installation profiles at http://drupal.org/project/installation+profiles . You can also find a number of "Distribution profiles" on the Drupal group site at http://groups.drupal.org/distributions .

Does anyone know of a way to disable the "tinkering" gene in guys. I am pretty sure I have it. I know my father had it. He could spend whole days in the garage working on some broken piece of equipment, investing hours of labor before abandoning the project and calling it "just tinkering". Well I have a XP laptop with a glitch that in got during a .NET update, so I am always getting odd messages and activities in other programs. For instance, in the middle of using TurboTax last year for taxes it glitched the program so it would not startup. Had to move the whole thing to my iMAC to finish. Recently I added Microsoft Office 2007 and now it is always starting up the installer. It also firmly rejects any Microsoft updates. I tried using Microsoft FixIt, but it just freezes up.

I think any sane person would have scrapped the laptop and moved on. However, with my "tinkering" gene I just keep trying to fix it. I can spend hours of time trying a whole host of possible solutions. Like now, after running the FixIt and having it stop and just sit there, I rebooted to find I now have an account for Guest and ASP.NET Machine.

Looks like a great afternoon of "tickering" ahead.

The title is a little misleading since Drupal documentation refers to two types of distributions termed installation profiles and distribution profiles. Once you go outside the main drupal.org or Drupal groups sites, you find that a couple third party organizations have assembled their own distribution packages. It is one of the oddities (sometimes not very amusing) of Drupal that the terms used may change over time. It also is the prerogative of the coder(creator) to name things whatever he/she/it chooses. Ah the joyous complexity of Drupal 6 and its documentation - a lot of things get written, but nothing seems to get rewritten.

Last week I decided to try out the Innovative News Install Profile. The install is supposed to create a News Web site with the major roles of Writer, Editor, Photographer and manager already created. Every attempt to install the profile ended with timeout errors. After each attempt, I also had to wipe out the WAMP test server and setup a new clean install. The problem turned out to be with the WAMP test server. After some serious searching, I found that the script was so big that one needed to go into the php.ini file of the test server and increase the wait time and memory.

I will continue to play with the News site until I transfer it to the production server as a sample site under my company site - http://www.comptoncoms.com .

I am looking at putting together a whole system of sites - News, Church, Intranet and Ecommerce - as both demonstration and training sites for customers. I recently built an ecommerce site using Drupal 6 and Ubercart 2 and learned that finding the right set of modules that can work together efficiently and effectively is not easy. However, after seeing how contributed modules to Drupal 6 just keep getting better and better, I decided the system is a serious CMS that should be used to build quality special purpose sites.

The ecommerce site is BodyVerde and the Ubercart module has a quality checkout and credit card system. I will try to keep you posted as I try new installs and Drupal 6 distributions.

So where have I been for the last six months. I have been on a trip to explore new Web site programming systems and online advertising programs for Google and Facebook. Much of my effort went into a new ecommerce site, BodyVerde – http://www.bodyverde.com.

I had not done an ecommerce site since 2005. This site uses Drupal 6 and Ubercart 2. This system is truly impressive. If you are developing an ecommerce site, I strongly recommend Drupal. Go to the Drupal site at http://drupal.org/ to download the core application. You can also get a wealth of information from the site about the system. I plan to be blogging about Drupal a lot in coming weeks.

Drupal is open-source software and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. The latest version of Drupal is 6.15. More than a Content Management System, Drupal is a Web programming framework that allows one to built quality Web site by combining the core modules with contributed modules that expand its functionality. If you are going to build a Drupal site, you need to understand some basics about the system.

First, no one is going to hold your hand to make sure you understand how to use, install, or configure the system. If you have a problem, you can go to the forums and get help. Sometimes the documentation is good, sometimes it is wrong, and sometimes it applies to an early version of the module and has not been updated. Thus it is important to read the notes and use a test server.

As I said, documentation is often incomplete, hard to find or missing. Remember nobody is getting paid to write topnotch guides or instructions. It is a free application. But programmers do like to talk about what great modules they have created, so the Drupal site is loaded with information about the core module in all its versions. The difficulty is in finding the information you may need among the thousands of pieces that may be based on versions 4.7 to 5.21 to 6.15. My recommendation – Get a good book like Drupal 6 Social Networking from Packt or a book on Drupal 6 released in the last year. Without such help even an experienced programmer may configure his/her way into a deadend.

For example, the Drupal 6 site I built has multiple modules for handling photos and images. One module allows uploads of photos directly to the server, another is used for adding photos to products and a third module is used for random photo illustrations.

During the development of the ecommerce Web site, there were at least four times when I ran into problems that required me to ask for help. The information I needed was on site, but I had to go to the forum and look for hints on where to find it. Once you discover a problem and find the solution, please help others by posting your finding or correction.

I have an Drupal sample site, I have put on my production server at http://www.comptoncoms.com/drupal/ and I plan to move to a my entire site to Drupal later this year and provide and portal for clients and combine functions now handled by separate programs such as blogs, forums and news.

I just added the iPhone to my iMac. Since I raved about the iMac in an earlier post, you might expect some ranting on the iPhone from me. Well, This post is not about the iPhone. I am saving that for a later more detailed post on iPhone apps. This is about a service offered by Apple called MobileMe. I had an opportunity when I got the iMac to subscribe, but I just couldn’t see any reason. Today, I can.

MobileMe is one slick system, if you have ever had a problem with getting several PCs on the same sheet of music. I work on an iMac, HP Media Center PC, Laptop PC and my new iPhone. Before that I had a Microsoft Mobile Smartphone or PPC. I fretted about how to get my 700+ contacts from my Windows PCs, iMac and iPhone consistent on each machine. With MobileMe that is not a problem. Once the devices are set up to sync via MobileMe cloud, no other effort is required to keep them consistent or current. With MobileMe, what I enter on my PC or iMac get automatically updated or changed on the others. That is some lofty computing.

I kept my contacts on my PC, because I used my iMac mainly for photos and video. When I bought my iPhone, I decided to buy MobileMe to provide backup for data rather than buy another external harddrive. Once I subscribed, I discovered I could also use it on my PCs. I installed the small app on my PC and selected what I wanted to sync. The application began syncing the contacts, bookmarks, calendar events, and asked me to resolve any conflicts. It put the conflicted entries side-by side and asked me to select. I resolved the multiple conflicts by deciding to use as source the MobileMe entries made via the iMac for photos and music and from the PC my contacts, calendar and bookmarks. It quietly went about pushing and pulling data until they were all consistent with the MobileMe cloud.

For $99 a year, I get 20GB of storage at www.me.com and an email address. Storage is sliced into 10GB each for email and 10 GB for iDisk (file storage). I can sync my contacts, calendar, photos and files on my PC (XP), iMac and iPhone. Now this is slick. For example, I add an event to my calendar using my iPhone and it shows up on my PC in Outlook.

The product is even more integrated on the iMac side. When I load photos or videos to my iPhoto program, they are backed up to MobileMe and can be configured in MobileMe as galleries accessible to the public or to friends you designate. The generated galleries are well designed and professional looking. You can set them as slideshows using a variety of effects. My Mexico trip is at available via password to family.

The last feature is the iDisk. I can quickly backup document to the cloud or document storage area on MobileMe. There is a public file area that can be used for Web sites that you build using iWeb. Using iWeb, I can quickly built a Web page from templates and my iPhoto galleries. Then click the publish button and it is on MobileMe with the page in http://web.me.com . MobileMe still has me in the clouds. Thanks Apple.
MobileMe