DrupalEd and DrupalBlog: Preconfigured Drupal Distributions

By cel4145 on 3 Jun 2004 at 03:43 UTC

Next week, I'll be presenting with three others on Drupal at the 2004
Computers and Writing Conference. My part will be to present an introduction
to Drupal and provide pre-configured versions of Drupal for the computers and
writing field, those teachers in English most concerned with the theory and
practice of writing with computers, electronic discourse, and the use of computers
in the classroom. It is my hope that by seriously reducing the learning curve
necessary to get a Drupal site up and running, Drupal will be more inviting
to the members of this discipline, and, indeed, other teachers and users as
well.

Thus, DrupalEd is a pre-configured Drupal install intended for an online writing
environment based upon my and others' experience teaching with Drupal this
past year. DrupalBlog is a general blog configuration of Drupal that I have
been using on my weblog and installing for others. Each contains Drupal 4.4.1
core and contributed modules without changes by me, except for the addition
of numerous Xtemplate skins (available
for download all together as a separate package). Each also contains a detailed
configuration guide that provides some basic instructions on initial site configuration.
The guides are built into the site within the collaborative book and included
in the distribution itself as a pdf. The install process is the same as for
Drupal with my database dumps and collections of files. However, the site uses
clean URL's, requiring that Apache mod_rewrite must be available to the .htaccess
file.

Note that the DrupalBlog distribution is not configured with education in mind,
but rather for bloggers in general. It would be suitable for anyone looking
to install and use Drupal for the first time, including the many MT users currently
shopping the web.

For those that are interested, you can download the DrupalEd
distribution or the DrupalBlog
distribution. Visit the DrupalEd
and DrupalBlog demo sites (feel
free to use the admin username and password listed in the installation section
of the guide). Or get the DrupalEd
Configuration Guide pdf and DrupalBlog
Configuration Guide pdf.

Thanks in advance for any feedback and suggestions. I do hope that at least part of this project will be useful for the site profiles to be included with the Drupal Install Wizard in 4.5.

Comments

Pretty cool

ti commented 3 June 2004 at 08:43

I browsed around and both of them look pretty cool. Great job with the documentations. That will help a lot of new users of Drupal. I'll try to install them on different servers and see how they work for someone setting them up by themselves.

try to install

cel4145 commented 3 June 2004 at 13:09

well, i don't know if the documentation will help much more with the install process than with the normal drupal core install; should be no more/no less easy.

but it should help with site setup. let me know what you think of the site configuration. some of the choices were in some sense arbitrary, based on my particular tastes and experience.

installing--a problem

cel4145 commented 4 June 2004 at 14:17

if you downloaded the drupaled dist yesterday, you'll have one problem. somehow i cleared the sequences table (probably because i meant to clear the sessions table). it's been fixed now.

Worked out well

ti commented 5 June 2004 at 23:24

I installed both of the distributions and they worked out well. I just wanted to see what a newbie blogger migrating to Drupal might see if s/he downloaded DrupalEd or DrupalBlog. I think having stock-Drupal preconfigured for blogging is an excellent idea. This way most of it can be adapted to whatever Drupal can do if the user later wants to (ie. adding a forum for regular readers of a blog, etc.). (DrupalEd is already pre-configured with a forum.) I think bloggers who currently use MT, WP, TP, PM, or other blogging CMSs and use it purely for blogging and don't muck around changing templates to something other than the default ones, or ones that their friends made for them, should be encouraged to look into DrupalBlog and DrupalEd. They do everything all these CMSs do out of the box now and then some and also come with some very blog-friendly themes. Once installed, one need not do much other than changing default passwords and start blogging.

One thing would be nice if you added drupaled_ or drupalblog_ prefixes in the .sql and in the conf.php. Some of the newbies might not know how to do it and many are hosted in shared hosting with maybe just one MySQL database.

adding prefixes

cel4145 commented 6 June 2004 at 01:20

This is a good suggestion. I had thought about that. But at the same time, I wanted to stay as stock Drupal as possible. If I add in table prefixes, then a newbie would not be able to follow the included instructions with additional contrib modules for installing them; they might have to modify the .sql file for another module.

On the other hand, someone with just one MySQL db would be more willing to figure out how for themselves. And someone with only one MySQL db might want to run more than one Drupal site and still have to figure it out for themselves. But just to help out, last night I added in instructions on using the $db_prefix, though, just to make things easier.

Oh, and I added in a couple of more themes today.

Great idea Charles!! I'm rea

Donovan commented 6 June 2004 at 02:03

Great idea Charles!! I'm really digging your DrupalBlog distro. Your instructions on db prefixes was timely -- I was just about to post regarding the error then I saw your fix which worked like a charm.

However, I'm now encountering the following error when creating a story:

user error: Duplicate entry '7' for key 1
query: INSERT INTO test_node (title, body, uid, type, teaser, status, promote, moderate, static, comment, created, changed, nid) VALUES('Test Story 2', 'test Story text...', '2', 'story', 'test Story text...', '1', '1', '0', '0', '2', '1086486946', '1086486946', '7') in /homepages/38/d97894505/htdocs/test/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 97.

The DrupalBlog config is sharing a MySQL database so I've given it a db prefix of "test_".

Any idea what's causing this error?

"It always seems impossible, until it is done."
- Nelson Mandela

sequences problem

cel4145 commented 6 June 2004 at 02:20

sorry...you downloaded sometime yesterday after i had accidentally unknowingly cleared the sequences table (i've been messing with this too much :). check and see which of these you have. if you have one already, make sure that the id value is the higher of either the suggestion below or what you have. then just run them as sql statements in phpadmin or mysql. just add your prefix before "sequences":

INSERT INTO `sequences` VALUES ('node_nid', 100);
INSERT INTO `sequences` VALUES ('vocabulary_vid', 2);
INSERT INTO `sequences` VALUES ('term_data_tid', 6);
INSERT INTO `sequences` VALUES ('bundle_bid', 0);
INSERT INTO `sequences` VALUES ('feed_fid', 1);
INSERT INTO `sequences` VALUES ('users_uid', 2);
INSERT INTO `sequences` VALUES ('access_aid', 0);
INSERT INTO `sequences` VALUES ('comments_cid', 2);

Fixed! Thanks.

Donovan commented 6 June 2004 at 03:32

Fixed! Thanks.

"It always seems impossible, until it is done."
- Nelson Mandela

DrupalEd new installation problems

dnegaard commented 2 July 2004 at 15:18

I installed DrupalEd on my Linux box (running Apache2 in a DMZ behind a LinkSys NAT firewall) and got everything working through the first page, but when I attempt to log in (using the default admin/english username/password) or click on any other link, the page displayed remains exactly the same. I can't log in, I can't view default content, I can't do anything. What have I done wrong?

My mySQL database is named phsenglish, and the database user is mysql. I set all the configuration items as specified in the DrualEd Site Administration Guide, but find myself stalled.

Oops... Never Mind

dnegaard commented 2 July 2004 at 15:36

I figured it out. I simply needed to make a link from /etc/apache2/mods-available/rewrite.load to /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/rewrite.load

Thanks.. and a question/suggestion.

sciman commented 19 July 2004 at 15:46

Thanks Charles, so very much. I installed DrupalEd without a problem and it felt great to get started. I've been playing with additional modules from that cool base.

One observation/question. With the basic install, when a student clicks to "create content" they're provided options and descriptions. How I wish those descriptions could be modified.... such that instead of "blog", I could describe the node as "journal", or "class suggestion" instead of "story", etc. Just a couple of lines of text would be so very helpful in order to tailor drupal to needs of educators. Think that's possible for a rather new kid at all of this?

modification of content description

cel4145 commented 19 July 2004 at 16:32

glad everything is going well :) if you have any pedagogical thoughts or concerns on using drupal, you would be welcome to come share them on kairosnews.org. there are a few of us there who are teachers that are using it.

as to your question, the node content type terms of "story" or "blog" is somewhat easy to change if you are comfortable working in the code. you'd have to create a copy of the module with the new name, then modify all the references in the module code to the new name. so for example, you could copy blog.module to journal.module, then do a find and replace with "blog" throughout the code with "journal." i'm not 100% positive that this would catch everything, but it might. you could do it, load it to your site, then enable the module, set permissions, and see if it works.

the descriptions are a little easier, but once again, you'd have to work with the module code. if you edit the module file, you'll find a function that contains that description. just change it to whatever you want.

meanwhile, i do wish it was easier to modify the descriptions. would be nice if this was provided in the individual node administration. seems like it could be a good drupal feature request.