Drupal Installation Notes

AG is down north in Canada taking photos. He expressed interest with my Drupal installation experience so what I can do right now is relate it to my WordPress/Mambo/Joomla experience. But before all that, it must be said that the biggest challenge for me is building a smooth workflow from a Microsoft Windows workstation to a Linux server—moving from a development environment to a production one:

• All of the products mentioned above require some sort of permission to write to disk. It is somewhat uncomfortable to open up these security holes on a Windows box. There is the temptation not to do it. This is the first step toward losing the semblance of mirroring the production environment from development. So, in development, I’m getting a few mkdir(), “permission denied” errors in my Drupal log. One way to solve this problem is to disallow anonymous access on the IIS development site.
• Another annoying IIS workaround for Clean URLs is detailed in “Using Clean URLs with IIS.” The documentation says, “You probably want to disable logging in IIS, since every page view is considered an error using this technique.” This is not an option.
• I’m not installing/enabling an email server on my Windows box. This means a mail() “Failed to connect to mailserver” error will appear in the Drupal log.
• I see no point in mirroring Drupal cron jobs in development. But does add a thin layer of complexity. What’s interesting here is that there’s an article called “Configuring cron jobs on DreamHost” on the Drupal.org site. I did not know my current Web host was so famous.
• I know that WordPress has cache functionality but Drupal actually has cache settings. Not that I’m going to use this stuff (now); currently it’s disabled. On the other hand, I look forward to working with the error handling configuration options—another level of pre-packaged configuration not available in WordPress, Mambo or Joomla.The next move is to try out the Tiny MCE module for Drupal—and of course to continue to improve the workflow from development to production. O Canada! No more Joomla!

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