Jason’s Linux Learning Journal

Last week at NCFR we officially kicked off our database migration. Working on a compressed implementation timeline, we’re leaping into a fast and furious few months with a planned go-live date in August.

So, this project is now officially on hiatus. But with some groundwork in place – a little bit of knowledge about the Drupal platform gained, and a few connections made with great people in the local developer community – I feel adequately prepared to keep an eye towards future development through the AMS implementation.

But another important piece just fell into place – the vendor we’re going with has a pre-packaged module available that interfaces with multiple CMS platforms, including several customers using Drupal “with great success.” Existing integration hooks between our database and content platform removes a major future hurdle to making this a reality. And the other customers of our AMS vendor who interface their systems with Drupal provide a user base that I can hopefully reach out to and learn from.

…I think that’s all there is to say for now. 

I’ve been bad about keeping up this blog, but its been a busy few weeks.

I finished Using Drupal and got busy drafting a first draft plan for what NCFR’s site should do. That draft was finished this week and forwarded to a few co-workers for review. I hope to get some feedback soon to revise it for feasibility, and start formulating an idea of how much work it’s going to take to make it a reality.

A couple of weeks ago Advantage Labs set me up with a sandbox site. It’s still a baseline installation, and I kind of feel bad for not doing anything with it yet, but my focus has been on the plan first. My Drupal installs so far have been all about going in and experimenting. When I start to build on this site, I want to be more methodical and work towards crafting some usable pieces.

Its also been an eventful few weeks at work. <bragging>I crafted and implemented a SQL job to update our e-mail lists nightly from the member database.</bragging> We also turned a big corner in the process of committing to a new member database. Choosing that software was my big project last year and it got delayed. We’re close now, nothing official yet but.. fingers crossed.

I see the content plan and test site as crucial preparation as we implement the database. Planning for the next big project is always crucial to keeping me employed continuous progress in member service delivery. Hopefully two years from now it’s a reality, with something else really cool on the horizon.

When I started this blog back in December my idea was that building a LAMP server was the path to getting started with Open Source Content Management Systems. I’ve known for a while that wasn’t totally accurate, but it was reinforced by Dries Buytaert’s blog on Microsoft featuring Acquia Drupal in their new Web Application Gallery.

As I’ve gotten into learning Drupal I’ve learned that while a LAMP stack is the traditional route and preferred in many circles, solutions for installing Drupal on a Windows box with IIS or Apache can also work well. It’s really kind of a moot point though. The route I took is getting me there, and in the long run mastering system administration just isn’t a goal that excites me. Building highly functional websites gets me going though.

And going I’ve been, up through chapter 9 of Using Drupal thus far. I skipped chapter 8 on multilingual sites and plan to skip chapter 10 on building an online store, leaving me two chapters shy of finishing the book. I’ve also drafted a sketch sitemap for a new NCFR content portal. My short-term goal right now is to finish the book, expand the sketch with some narrative into a first draft RFP for building the site. Hopefully in time for the Twin Cities Drupal Group meeting next Wednesday.

And then… well, this project is likely going to get put on the back burner for a few months. There are two major projects looming at work – a refresh of our website and implementing a new database. Once those greenlight, my focus will be elsewhere. But having the groundwork laid for a content portal will be invaluable in terms of preparing to integrate it while the other pieces fall into place.

Anyway, that LAMP stack next to my coffee table is humming and this book ain’t gonna read itself. Onward and upward!

About a week-and-a-half ago Amazon delivered my copy of Using Drupal, by Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Nathan Haug, Jeff Eaton, James Walker & Jeff Robbins.

Clearly, the first thing to notice about this book is that it has a lot of authors! But reading it gives a strong sense that they write with a unified voice. It seems to me that this parallels the philosophy that powers Drupal (and other open-source software communities): utilizing a process that takes everyone’s contributions into a whole and comes out with a consensus result of the best of what everyone has to offer.

So I am now 150 pages into this 400 page book, finishing chapter 3 today. The first two chapters were geared towards introducing and getting started with Drupal. Having played with the software for a couple weeks prior to getting the book, much of this was review to me – but I also learned a few things, and reading a formal training for the features I’ve stumbled through produced a good share of “oh, that’s what that does” moments.

Chapter 3 is where the book really started getting interesting, as it and every remaining chapter covers direct examples of how to build features – walking you through them step-by-step using source code downloaded from the publisher’s website. As Barry Madore told me while recommending the book, “it has some great recipes, but more importantly it’ll teach you how to cook.” And the first entrée is apparently the equivalent of Drupal’s meat and potatoes: CCK and Views.

The book’s authors begin chapter 3 by stating:

“This chapter outlines the two most powerful features in Drupal. Yes, we’re stating outright that the two most powerful features are the Content Creation Kit and Views. … CCK and Views form the foundation of nearly every other project in this book and most of the Drupal-powered websites on the Internet.”

It’s comforting to me to know that I’ll get more practice with these modules through the rest of the book, because stepping through them once in the chapter 3 exercise left me feeling two things:

1. Wow, these are really cool! I understand the flexibility of CCK to create custom content types, and the power of Views to dynamically display that content almost any given way.
2. Wow, these are complicated! The result of the exercise gave me a taste of what they can do, but even after going through it I don’t fully understand how it was done.

So yeah, what I do know is that I just finished creating a sample job posting site using custom content types for the job postings and applications, then setting up views for this content based on user permissions, including a block in the sidebar that dynamically lists the logged-in user’s applications. I also know now that I’m working with a remarkably well-written reference, because it painlessly took me through complex steps that I barely understood and finished with a neat little functional demo site.

In conclusion, I’m now at a point with Drupal where I feel that I know a lot about what I don’t know – in other words I’ve gotten a good sense for the platform’s capabilities, and been introduced to how it’s most powerful features work, but my grasp on how to use them is very shaky. As I continue stepping through the exercises in Using Drupal, my hope is that the practice begins to instill me with some competence using these tools.

I got Drupal and WordPress installed on my LAMP a week ago Friday. Two days before that I returned home from a week in Mexico – an awesome sunny getaway made possible by my awesome musician brother getting booked to play at Club Med Cancun, and bring a guest along for free. Anyway it was great, it was refreshing, and with my renewed state and a few additional vacation days at home I felt the capacity return to dive back into this project.

The first couple of days were spent standing up the deployments – figuring out a few nuances with configuration options, creating the MySQL databases, figuring out how to set up a cron job, etc. These were the areas where the groundwork from the books I read was really valuable – without that knowledge I wouldn’t have known the concepts I was working with. On the flip side though, I also wish I hadn’t had to return the books to the library before doing this. There were plenty of points where I wanted to go look something up, knew where to find it quickly in the book, but instead had to sift through the interweb for help.

My biggest problem since getting the sites up has been getting myself to quit playing with them and go to bed already, ’cause it’s already way past a reasonable hour. Yeah, I’m pretty exhausted at this point. Yet happy – ’cause its been time spent playing with a shiny new toy and there’s lots to discover.

I am actually very excited by the potential though. Drupal has the capability to power a new community site for NCFR – its flexibility, customizability, ability to parse and feed out data, and natural propensity for catering to a community of users .. it’s going to take a lot of work, but I feel that the capacity and potential is really there.

WordPress is another story, and I’m wavering on whether or not to continue a two-pronged development path using it for our blog. WP’s advantages are that it’s a better blogging platform, has a more user-friendly admin interface and a more elegant look. It does not have the same natural capacity that Drupal does to be host our user community though, and since Drupal can host our blog (and by extension do so in a fashion that integrates with our user community) it would be both less work and more synergistic in the long run to do this. But WP is pretty and I’m not ready to take it off the table yet.

That said, my primary focus this past week has been on Drupal. My first venture was with the latest version (6.9) from drupal.org. After getting it stoop up, I dove into the administrative options and started getting a feel for the site. Then came looking at modules to extend it and realizing how overwhelming a task that can be. I got to the where, again, I felt like I would need to step back to do some studying and seek advice. But there were still more chips to fall this week…

On Friday the Minnesota Council on Nonprofits held its annual Technology and Communications conference. I went to the same event last year and got a lot out of it, but (for reasons that I won’t go into detail about here) I was on the fence about whether to attend this year. But as I was stumbling around Drupal resources on the web I came to information about the Twin Cities Drupal Users Group, saw that the group meets at Advantge Labs and thought I recognized that name. So when I searched for nonprofit events involving Advantage Labs, I noticed that developers from that company were presenting a session at Friday’s conference titled So You Want a Drupal Website, Now What?, and no longer had any question whether I’d be attending.

Another significant development this week was finding Acquia Drupal. Just as I was planning to ask where to start looking for modules to build on, here’s a distribution pre-packaged with high-quality modules. I found that on Thursday night and planned to ask on Friday if it might be a good starting point.

Friday’s conference was excellent, and the Drupal session didn’t dissapoint. I didn’t even have to ask whether or not starting with a pre-packaged distribution was where to start – they addressed it in their presentation. (The answer was a definite yes.) After the session I chatted with Allie Micka for a little bit, and hope that was the start of a rewarding business partnership. I think that when this project reaches the point where we’re ready for a production environment, our best course will almost certainly involve both managed hosting and a developer that can help mentor us and guide its course to success. I’ve very impressed by the potential for Advantage Labs to fulfill this role.

But in the short-term I keep digging down the rabbit hole, and I’ve got plenty in front of me yet. On Friday night I started over with Acquia Drupal, dug into its admin interface and started to see what it can do out-of-the-box. I have to say that where my initial Drupal deployment was like a shiny new toy, the second Acquia deployment is shiny shiny shiny shiny .. wow! Yeah its cool and I’m totaly geeking out to it here, playing with the hundreds of options, putting some sample content in, and starting to really visualize what this can become. Meanwhile I asked Allie for a book recommendation to get me going, and she spoke highly of Using Drupal. I ordered it on Amazon and should have it next week.  On Monday I am going to print the Acquia Drupal documentation and dive into learning from that too. Over the next couple of months I hope to arm myself with knowledge and some trial-and-error experience, build a relationship with Advantage Labs as both a mentor and potetial vendor for the final product, develop a formal plan detailing what specific functions we want from the site as well as analysing the costs and benefits of a sustainable deployment, and of course get a functional-enough prototype going that I can bring to the office and get my co-workers as excited about this as I am.

It’s a great feeling to have such a fun project with so much potential in front of me, but on a personal note I also have to remember to balance it out a bit. I’ve been on a kick the last week, staying up past midnight every night playing with this. That’s been fun but it’s unsustainable. I’m exhausted, my house is dirty, other projects are piling up, did I mention I’m exhausted? OK, to use a cliche the point is that this is a marathon and I’ve been sprinting. I don’t regret it, and I’m sure that other points in the project will come along where I immerse myself, but for now I need to temper my heady enthusiasm with some discipline and direction. Not burning myself out is a personal key to success here.

OK, it’s been a while since I wrote here. In the past two-and-a-half months I’ve gotten through the holidays, another birthday, hit my goal of hitting the gym 12 times last month and spent a week in Mexico. Oh yeah, I also finished those books and got both Drupal and WordPress running on the computer. 

Both books were easy reads and well suited to my skill level, and while they definitely don’t make me an expert – I do feel like I’ve got a grasp on some of the basics, and that’s a foundation to build on.

A couple of lessons I’ve learned along the way:

• When trying to reboot the Apache server, trying the command sudo reboot reboots the computer. This does however accomplish rebooting the web server
• I don’t remember why I initially had to sudo firefox (think it was to have write access to download a file directly into a directory), but my homepage, bookmarks, etc, seem to have permanently assigned to the root user. Am now launching Firefox as root every time in order to access them.

I have to say I’m really digging Linux. The flexibility and power is pretty awesome in comparison to what I’m used to with Windows. The flip side of course is that its less forgiving and there are fewer roadblocks and checks against falling down the rabbit hole. (Such as accidentally launching into a shell environment with no clue how to return to the GUI short of rebooting the machine.) But I’ve hit the point where its up-and-running, and serving its purpose as a dev server. So my focus has now shifted to the really fun part .. developing prototype websites with open source Content Management Platforms!