I have spent the majority of the last two day's having my first look into the Drupal content management/development platform. My first impressions are that Drupal could actually be something quite useful for me when building sites that need to be maintained by somebody else. In fact, after a recent meeting with the Design and Technology teaching staff I'm using some of their ideas and requirements as a Drupal test subject. They want a gallery and a glossary and Drupal has modules for both - hurrah!
I have to admit however, for almost two full day's of work I don't have much of a site yet :$ If I had been using my usual photoshop / dreamweaver combo I would have at least had decent page template and some kind of site architecture. Alas, that has not been the case with Drupal.
Day 1 - Setting up a database and installing the core codebase. You would think that would be the easy part huh? Oh my god. I can not tell you how long it took me to set up that bloomin' database. I feel that the process was hindered by the fact that I actually read and followed some instructions. I spent an absolute age trying to run some kind of script in phpMyAdmin which I never actually got to work properly. I did a bit of asking around and decided to ftp the codebase to the server and see what happened anyway. It worked ... well, kind of. I spent a couple of hours trying to get the php.ini file working properly because my hosting isn't very Drupal friendly. I gave up and went home.
Day 2 - After giving up on the php.ini file on Day 1, I managed to get it working in literally moments on day 2. Typical. I then started playing around with installing new themes (easy peasy) and modules (easy peasy install to the back end but still no sign of them on the front end website). At one stage I found a seemingly very useful feature ... a site maintenance option that essentially turns off the site and displays a we're-working-on-it type message. This is all very well and good until you consider that you need to be IN the site to edit it and if you close the admin area while you are still in site maintenance mode you can't get back in. Well, after searching the Drupal Support forums I discovered that there is a back door, obviously, but you do need to be able to remember your password which I couldn't for a while LOL. I was horrified at the time but it is reeeeeeeally funny in hindsight.
So, today is Day 3. I'm going to try and get the modules actually working properly. One of them is a gallery2 module which means I get to play with some other open source goodness :o))
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