Checking out Drupal
Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 19 May 2004 22:22:12 GMT
As I mentioned before, I’m sort of looking for something to replace Movable Type for this website.
This is only partially related to MT’s recent pricing announcements; I can get by with the free single-blog version of MT, at least for now. Rather, I’d like to expand my basic blog to include some of the pieces of http://svn.scottstuff.net and my photo gallery, with a single comment engine tying everything together. And MT just isn’t up to it right now.
I spent some time this weekend looking into Drupal, which is a heavy-weight system that can scale down to individual blogs, but scales up to large community or political sites. The Dean campaign was using Drupal, for example. It has a few things going for it:
- Supports non-blog static pages, with or without comments.
- Has an active community.
- Has atom and wiki plugins (untested).
- Has gallery photo plugin.
On the other hand, I’ve hit two serious snags:
- I can’t find a Markdown plugin for it. Google suggests that it exists, but I haven’t seen it anywhere. I could probably just take the Textile plugin and graft the PHP Markdown library into it.
- It’s written in PHP.
- I can’t get its “clean URL” support to work right. By default, Drupal uses “index.php?q=…” URLs, but you can get it to generate nice, clean URLs with very little work. Just click one radio button in the web configuration UI, and there you go. Er, once you get
mod_rewriteworking with Apache. I spent two hours on it, fighting with mod_rewrite and Apache 2, and the best I could do was get it to give me a400 Bad Requesterror whenever I fed it a URL that should have been rewritten. The rewrite log looks okay, but it doesn’t actually work.
If I can fix the two big problems, then I’ll probably build a test site using the regular scottstuff.net contents, and see where things go from there.
This may not help, but with Apache and mod_rewrite properly configured, clean URLs “just work”. That being said, I have yet to use Drupal with Apache 2.
The wiki plugin works, but the first thing I did was change the one line that creates new blog entries to make it create book entries instead. Of course, this also enables wiki text formatting, which may or may not conflict with Markdown. Book pages may solve much of the uses that you might use a Wiki for.
The atom plugin only produces an atom feed for the front page…not very useful. There will likely not be a ton more work on this area until the entire feed generation engine is re-factored, and potentially when atom is more ready for prime-time.
But Drupal is very powerful and flexible, and is great for organizing many different snippets of information.
Hi ! :) I was looking for Drupal owners, and Goggle sent me here. I’m TRYING to build and manage a Linux Server. I need http services, Mysql power, PHP services and i hope also ASP. To avoid different sever for different technologies. I want to offer to my friends Drupal for free blogs. I see that you’re trying it. If it is ok, can you send me an-email ? :) Or, better, if you find important bugs.. also? :) Thanks. Tieko
Boris – as for clean URLs, it’s plain that they’re supposed to work, and Google suggests that the only people with problems are using tightly locked-down hosting services. So I’m feeling kind of alone with this one. One of the release notes for Apache 2.0.49 suggests that they fixed a problem that can cause 400 errors with mod_rewrite; I should probably check out what they fixed, because I’m running 2.0.49 and it’s broken.
I checked out the Atom and Wiki plugins yesterday, and ran into both issues that you pointed out. The Atom feed is mostly worthless, and the Wiki plugin is just a formatting filter. So I’ll probably drop both of them for now.
I’m actually fairly impressed with the whole thing. Besides the rewrite problem and the lack of a Markdown filter, the only remaining problem that I’m seeing is with the notify plugin–it doesn’t come with a schema for postgresql, and 60 seconds worth of effort didn’t make the mysql schema work. I’ll fiddle with it later, if I can solve the other two problems.