First Impressions/Setup day!

Hi everyone!

I set up this blog to detail my experiences with Drupal over the next two or so months. Hopefully I can use this blog as a resource for those who were as nervous or overwhelmed as I was about starting up a website through the Drupal "CMS". I hope this proves useful for someone out there.


I'm Tom, and I'm a summer student at local public library. I'm a college student, doing a computer programming course. My supervisor asked me not too long ago if I'd ever developed an intranet web page before, and I replied truthfully, "not really". I'd put together some extremely basic websites in C#/.NET, and even more extremely basic websites in HTML/Javascript. They then pointed me towards Drupal. I began reading up on Drupal around a week ago (June 10, 2008), doing research, reading up on documentation, and eyeballing some modules that I was interested in, and decided it was something I was going to try and tackle, and maybe learn something new.

We then had a bunch of meetings about website layout, and what they wanted from what their shiny new intranet. We decided to separate all the departments into different pages, each with a different blog (headed up by whoever leads the department), and a separate forum for group members to discuss issues and ideas within their department. Also, they wanted a centralized place to post up policies and guidelines. In short, they wanted to reduce email traffic, centralize all of the word documents and spreadsheets that make up a horrendous network drive, and allow the staff to search for what they need quickly and easily.

So this was all well and good. Then we got to specifics, and extra features, which I expressed as optional for the moment. They wanted RSS feeds generated from their book catalogue database placed on certain pages, flickr albums all over the place, and a lot of other little gizmos and gadgets. This is where I had to kind of put my foot down. I told them that I was working on a limited timeline, and I'd do my best to get those kinds of things into the website, but I wasn't making guarantees. I have until mid-august to finish this website as much as possible, and then I'm off doing my own thing, and heading back to school. I think, in retrospect, that was very important. Getting bogged down worrying about where you're going to fit extra content can be murderous on time constraints, and there's no way to please everyone completely.

Now, for the install.

I chose Drupal 5.7 because it was stable, and there were a multitude of modules readily available, as opposed to Drupal 6, which seemed to be a little bit less supported at this point, in terms of addons and modules.

The install went extremely smoothly. The database was easy to create, and the documentation for it was just right. The only snag I hit was the GD addon to PHP. I didn't take care of that personally, but I understand it was a quick add in, no hassle involved. I decided to try and set up a server on my ubuntu partition on my laptop, and it all went surprisingly easily. I had an Apache server, with PHP (and the GD addon), and drupal running (serving my local machine only...) in about an hour, downloads included. The GD addon was as simple as one line of sudo apt-get install php5-gd, and restarting the Apache server.

My next step will be trying to set up an authentication method for the server that pulls the login information from the local intranet authentication, and automatically puts it through to Drupal, so users don't have to log in twice.

Until my next post,

Tom.