General discussion

I was just wondering how "up to date" the released 4.7b3 package is compared to CVS? Are things like the new Form API included in the b3 package?

I am seriously thinking about launching on 4.7 after I found some docs about the differences in 4.6 v 4.7 modules....

Thanks

How do we set a default value to a select.

I am going to be setting up quite an extensive site with several different sections that should get thousands of hits a day. Several features of the site will have to be custom coded. This will be a site that is half community and half static content. It will also need may different rss feeds.

Two of the cms solutions I am considering are drupal and plone/zope and I am wondering what people think would be better and why.

I recently installed InstantRails (http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl) on one of my laptops. Instant Rails is part of the Ruby on Rails (http://www.rubyonrails.org/) movement. It is an extremely easy way to get a fully functional Ruby on Rails development environment installed on a windows machine. You simply download the archive, unzip it wherever you want, run a single .exe and you are done. The installation comes with PHP, phpMyAdmin, MySQL, Apache, and of course Ruby and the Rails environments. This is the easiest combined web development environment install I have ever seen. I have used Xampp, the saint, etc. and this one beats them all for ease of installment. Not too bloated either.

I pulled down one of my production drupal sites, dropped it in the apache directory, adjusted the settings file and it came up in the browser the first time. Very easy and you get to play around with ruby to boot.

Thought this was so easy that it might appeal to some in our ranks. While I am pushing products, I am also using PHP Designer 2006 (http://www.mpsoftware.dk/) a really great FREE editor. Also handles HTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, VBScript, SQL(various flavors), Perl, Java, C#, Multi (syntax highlighting for php, html, css, xml, and javascript in a single document). Really great all around editor with a very small footprint.

Just thought this info might be useful to some! Cheers!

Dear Drupalites,

I have been running my website with Drupal for about 6 months now. It was an intense struggle to get it running to even try it out on the platform available to me, Debian + Apache + Postgresql. At first Drupal couldn't connect at all to my pgsql database via Unix sockets because there is a bug witn parsing in the pg_connect function that was never fixed (I have the fix if anyone needs it). The worst part was getting all the permissions on folders and database tables setup so that Drupal could work but the site was still secure. Essentially, I have to grant permissions on every single table and sequence created by hand, and bug my hosts to edit permissions on any folders that drupal creates so that I can have access to any files it makes. Any upgrades that require database changes are iffy, because my server will not allow changes to tables that haven't had their permissions already tweaked by me. Therefore, it is possible to run the upgrade script and have it create new tables, but then it can't modify them from the web-based script so data might be corrupted and I might have to hand-edit the script and run it again after tweeking perms. So this is a real pain in the ass, and not at all user-friendly. In fact, it's torture.

But I got it working. There are bugs here and there, really really annoying bugs, but the site operates. So I wanted to expand it and add my photography like I used to have on my old site, and I tried the Attachment/Filemanager/Acidfree route, and boy am I at my wit's end. I have been hounding my hosts to change permissions on the folders (not documented at all) that filemanager uses so that it can operate, but it still isn't working. Seems like the files are being uploaded, but then it isn't being copied to the proper place or something. In any case, I can't get it to work. And I've been doggedly trying for about 3 weeks. So this really, really, really sucks because it means that Drupal is not really a content management system. The upload module was just fine for me, except it doesn't really expand well to multiple users or do mass uploads, and I am just not going to individually upload all my photos to a node. That is the definition of a waste of time.

Hello Drupalites,

I am just beginning to test Drupal to see if it will meet my needs for an upcoming web application project. Since I already test- drove some of the new MVC frameworks (RubyOnRails, TurboGears, Django) it is helping me to conceptualize Drupal in a similar vein (as a MVC framework).

Some of you might find this interesting and might be able to tell me if this has any relevance or if I am completely wrong.