Pragmatic Enthusiast

We are close to launching our re-designed website for the church I attend. To gain a bunch of functionality and enable easier updating we picked the Drupal CMS as a framework. The past three months have been a journey of discovery into its features that is reflected in our home page...

I’ve been using SUSE quite a bit lately and before this current job it was CentOS (a.k.a. RedHat) all the time...There are plenty of HOWTOs on each distro as well as forums and discussion threads that answer specific questions on where things are located, defaults, commands for restarts, etc. but I haven’t come across a simple comparison chart so here’s my attempt:

Today’s post will cover some basic, essential modules that are generally recognized as “required” for most types of projects. Having worked previously with other packages such as DotNetNuke, I’ve learned that the Drupal core team takes a different approach – probably due to its Unix heritage.

After initial setup and login, you should back up your database and site. Two reasons for doing so are if you do something “bad” and need to get back to an earlier state and in case you want to quickly clone the existing site.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s 10K worth for why you should check out Beyond Compare. It’s the one tool that I use every day I’m working at my computer. I’ve used it to compare not only files and folders but zip files to folders - it treats a zip like a folder and let’s you update the zip in situ. I’ve also used it to compare two Word documents, two Excel spreadsheets, MP3 files (tags), version stamps on executables. However, I wasn’t aware it could compare two photographs and show a “mask” of the differences between them!! It’s also the “external” tool I use for differencing in version control systems. If you earn your living using a (Windows or Linux) computer, how can you not afford to spend $50 to increase your productivity?

In the first article, I covered the basic steps for preparing a CentOS 5.3 installation for Drupal 6 by installing and configuring MySQL. This article covers the last quartet of the LAMP stack – PHP as well as initial installation of Drupal 6.

Having just embarked on a side project to build a community website using Drupal 6 I decided to capture the steps both for documentation purposes and to help others who may seek to do the same.

One thing I discovered about integrated applications is that only Windows installer-based applications will be “exported” from the XP Mode machine to the Windows 7 host. I decided to install...

I just finished installing Win7 RTM x64 on my Lenovo T61p and here’s the results of the Windows Experience Index (WEI):

When I attempted to switch my home page over to Google I was jarred with this unexpected dialog from those brilliant minds on the Apple Safari team