I had a need to learn Drupal, the open source content management system. This post is to capture some comments about the experience. To do the experience justice would require writing a book. Anyway…
The server I had access to runs windows XP. All early indications was that while not optimal, Drupal does run under XP. This is accurate, but I discovered that to use friendly urls requires the apache web server re-write mod which is not a part of Windows IIS. There are versions of a re-write mod available to install on windows but who wants to mess with the Windows IIS system. Since this is a test system I can live without the friendly URLs.
The server already had PHP and MySql installed so the installation of Drupal went fairly smoothly although I have on the administer page the following:
One or more problems were detected with your Drupal installation. Check the status report for more information.
which tells me directory permissions are set wrong. This message persists regardless of what I do with permissions and does not seem to affect the installation. I’ll live with this until I get a chance to track down the issue (ISS permissions vs NTFS permissions perhaps?)
I managed to get this site converted from the original hardcoded html to Drupal based. But then I found one of the modules I was using (the book module) had a bug. This of course was discovered by first noticing a that I could not delete a book, then googling around, wading through postings etc. Finally finding a thread of patches, each one followed by "patch failed" message. Finally at the bottom of the thread was a "patch passed" message.
Great! I now have a patch, but no instructions on how to apply it. Back to google. Search "drupal patching". What… download Cygwin? Crap…. I don’t want to install more software on the server. Especially an entire Unix emulation system. (Note I like Unix, have used Unix, have installed Cygwin on other systems etc. )
More googling…. what about GNU patch.exe. Ok I’ll try that. Hey am I having fun yet? Well I am really appreciating WordPress and its automatic update feature on its modules. If a module in WordPress has an update available I’m notified and by clicking a link it will automatically apply the update. Nice. With Drupal… No I’m not having fun yet. Now I’m trying to figure out how to get the patch program to run under Vista (my desktop machine).
Ok, I’m going for the easy fix…. Open MySql Admin, find the catalog, open the book table and delete the record… Done!