[Nfb-web] Drupal Installation

[Michael Hansen]

Peter,

Here are some tips to get you started

Installation Directory: Eventually you will probably want the root of
your webite URL to point to your drupal installation. I have come up
with what I think is a slick way of doing this. I created a symbolic
link (named www) in my public_html folder on nfbnet.org and had Dave
point the weberver to that symbolic link. This allows me to move the
root of my website around with out intervention from Dave or his
consultant by simply changing what the symbolic link points to. The
benefit of this is 2 fold.

First it allowed me to keep my original website up and running while I
built the drupal website in a subdirectory. Then when I was ready to
cut things over I just chnaged the symbolic link to point to my drupal
install and I was cut over.

Second, it allows me additional options durring a drupal upgrade by
beeing able to install a new version of drupal without removing the
previous one. Thus allowing my to revert to the previous install more
easily if there is a problem with the upgrade.

To create a symbolic link in a *nix enviroment you us the ln -s command

NOTE: If you choose to go this way you will want to create the
symbolic link and then contact Dave to point your webserver to it.

Drupal Test Site: It is highly recomended by the Drupal community to
have a drupal test site available to try out new modules and new code
before putting it on to your public site. For instance www.ne.nfb.org
has a test site at test.ne.nfb.org, www.az.nfb.org has a test site at
test.az.nfb.org and so on.

NOTE: I also use symbolics links for the test sites as well so in my
public_html forlder on nfbnet.org there is a symbolic link (named
test) that Dave points to. Again this gives me more flexibility and
also allows upgrades of the test site to go more smoothly.


LESSON LEARNED: When I first started to look at moving Nebraska's site
to drupal I hadn't yet setup a test site, so I installed drupal in a
subdirectory. This worked fine however it later made me have to do
some funny hacks to keep some links that I had hard coded from
breaking when I changed the symbolic link to point directly at the
Drupal install. I probably should have used my test site or even
better a 3rd site name (drupal.ne.nfb.org) to develop my original
Drupal site. The other thing that I might have done better was to make
better use of relative paths versus absoute paths.

Relative versus Absolute paths. If you have both a primary and a test
site you want to make sure that the paths you use are relevant on both
sites. This is because a commonly performed task is to restore a copy
of your primary site on your test site for testing. If the path
structure you choose doesn't match up on both sites then you will have
problems with the links on your site.

Further detail on paths. Just to emphasize the point above at one time
on the nebraska site I had links that specified the domain name (ie
href="http://www.ne.nfb.org/views/23"), I had links that didn't
specify the domain name but were absolute to the root of the website
(ie. href="/views/23"). Finally and had some truely relative paths
(ie. href="23"). This caused me various problems whe I would restore
backups of the primary site on my test site. It also caused me to have
to adjust some links when I cut over to the new site by pointing the
symbolic link to the drupal subdirectory hence making it the root of
my web site. Today now that I have everything cutover I am using paths
relative to the root of my site for everything. In my situation these
are coping over just fine to my test site when I do restores.

So in short:
1. Pick a host name to use to build your intial drupal site (ie.
http://drupal.nfb-writers-division.org/)
2. Create a test site to allow testing outsite of our public site (ie.
http://test.nfb-writers-division.org/)
3. Use absolute path names relative to the root of the website (ie.
href="/node/23")


Some esentail add-on modules that I am sure you will want to have
installed at some point would be

Advanced Help                           http://drupal.org/project/advanced_help
Backup and Migrate                    http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate
Content Construction Kit (CCK)    http://drupal.org/project/cck
Views                                        http://drupal.org/project/views

Some add-on modules that I recomend you possible look at

Printer, email and, PDF versions  http://drupal.org/project/print
Taxonomy Access Control           http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_access


I hope this helps you get started. let me know if you have any further questions
Mike
---
Mike Hansen
NFB of Nebraska



On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 3:25 PM, Peter Donahue <pdonahue1 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Good afternoon everyone,
>
>    Given the discussions about Drupal I decided to Drupalize my mind too.
> Having received permission from another one of our affiliates to use Drupal
> we're ready to install it. Before proceeding I need to know if I should
> install it to the root  directory or should it be installed to its own
> directory as one does with blogging, wiki, and calendar software? Any tips
> and tricks you can share with me concerning Drupal installation will be very
> much appreciated. Thanks for your help.
>
> Peter Donahue
>
>
>
>
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