Jason’s Linux Learning Journal

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.