I'm new to drupal and am interested in using Drupal as a CMS backend for my iPhone apps. I'm following this article: http://www.jefflinwood.com/2011/07/building-a-simple-ipad-application-wi...
I installed drupal 7.16 (via cpanel)
I've installed:
services_7.x-3.2
ctools_7.x-1.2
services_views-7.x-1.0beta2
rest_server_plist-7.x-1.0
libraries-7-x-2.0
then when I try to install:
views-7.x-3.5
I get an error page:
Not Acceptable
An appropriate representation of the requested resource /drupaltest/ could not be found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
I googled around and can't find what I need to do exactly to get this working.
any help is greatly appreciated
Comments
I don't know the answer, but
I don't know the answer, but a couple of pointers. Did you enable ctools first?
Check you put views in the correct directory! Obvious I know. Check your uploaded modules have correct ownership and permissions.
If you have command line access (and since you making iOS apps I guess you familiar with using CLI), get drush. You can install modules with drush. You can also use drush to do a cache clear. Sometimes uninstalling a module then re-enabling it sorts things out. Because it allows you to disable, or uninstall modules, and do a cache clear on a crashed site, you can often fix problems in a minute or two.
Also bear in mind that Drupal often crashes if your server is under-resourced, in terms of insufficient RAM or disk IO (either inherently insufficient, or if the sever is shared or is an OpenVZ VSP, because other sites are using the resources).
Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors
re: I don't know the answer, but
> Did you enable CTools first?
The ctools thingy is a box with 7 or 8 checkboxes. The only one I enabled is called "Chaos tools" 'A library of helpful tools by Merlin of Chaos.'
Should I enable more of them?
> Check you put views in the correct directory! Obvious I know. Check your uploaded modules have correct ownership and permissions.
I actually didn't put them in any directory. I just said 'add module', point it to the zip file I downloaded, and then when it nornally goes to an install screen is shows me the error. All the other modules which I installed worked in a similar manner.
Would it help if I figure out how to installa a module manually?
> Commandline interface drush....
I'm not at all versed in the wonderful world of commandline interfaaces. I typically prefer gui's and click on buttons instead of memorizing switches ;^)
If I'll choose drupal as the cms of choice as a ios backend system, I'll definitely put some time into learning it. It does sound like a faster way of doing things,
> under-resourced
It could very well be that the vps I'm using is underresourced. But I can't change that for now.
I do would expect a different error to popup in case I'm out of resources though.
Ctools should be enough, the
Ctools should be enough, the dependencies (modules which Views depends on and which must be enabled frist) are listed on the modules page. Bear in mind that to set up View you also need to enable Views UI.
The time learning command line becomes almost essential with Drupal in my experience. People run Drupal without it, but hey, what do yo do when you have a 'white screen of death' and crashed site? At this point you have no choice but to get into the server to fix the site, as there is no browser interface. I work on Drupal and Wordpress, with Drupal I have had to fix dozens of crashed sites. I had a server error page on one of my sites only yesterday. The client was complaining his site was down. Without command line it might have taken me days to fix. From command line, it was 5 minutes of mild stress, then the site was live again.
Any VPS which has burstable RAM means you are sharing RAM with other users. They are very unpredicatble. VPSs with Xen virtualization are much more predictable, you get the RAM you pay for. Linode are often seen as the best in the Drupal world, and experience has taught me you get what you pay for, But running Drupal on a VPS with 1GB RAM is very tight when you start adding up how much RAM the site actually needs to run: just dp the sums, adding the various things which need RAM.
If you are out of RAM you may see an error. On the other hand, sometimes changes in Drupal suffer from disk IO problems and this can cause a failure without showing an out of memory error. Having said that, it is always worth looking at the Reports > Recent Log Messages on your Drupal site for errors. Sometimes when there is a disk error during an update, you need to roll back to your previous database backup before re-running the update. In the case of a failed module install, running an uninstall on the module before re-installing it often helps as a less drastic solution than a database backup restore.
Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors
if drupal the choice for me then?
Thanks so far for the great insights.
I was wondering. I'm researching drupal only to have some kind of basic CMS where customers can manage their content but it doesn't have to be great.
The most important thing is that the content itself can be requested via some kind of rest api with json responses so I can use it in my mobile app.
If Drupal is so high on resource usage, perhaps using drupal is overkill for what I need?
If so, do you perhaps know of what kind of lightweight CMS might work better? Is wordpress a viable option for instance?
thanks!
I cannot really advise as I
I cannot really advise as I have not done this yet but have looked into it. Drupal is easier to customise in general and may be a good option of you are letting your app users log in and give you their data. I have never really thought about doing it in Wordpress. Drupal has the services module http://drupal.org/project/services so I would go for Drupal myself. The problem with Drupal is that traditionally it is a page-based system which (especially for logged-in users who get less or no caching) bootstraps the whole complex page-building code for each call. I cannot recall whether that is true for Services module. It will not be true of Drupal 8 (out next August, maybe), which is designed to be well suited to this type of use.
Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors
thanks for your help!
thanks for your help!