Posts tagged drupal
Just a weekend recap
Apr 20th
Since my last post describing how I was getting into Drupal, I’ve worked on it a total of once. Not exactly going to get me closer to my goal of figuring out how it all comes together. This seems to be the way I operate; I get excited about something, I start working on it, I build a few pages, get a very low-level basic knowledge of whatever it is I’m working on, and then I let it go idle for a period of time. I’m trying to overcome that, but not having a lot of success at the moment. Too many other distractions.
One of those distractions is back – soccer season has swung into full gear. Our team had its first game of the season this past Saturday, which we won, 1-0. It was a great game, and we had some great plays by our keeper. After the whistle blew sounding the end of the game, we were all giving each other high-fives and congratulations and lining up to go shake the other teams’ hands when I noticed Sarah was in tears. I asked what was wrong and she said she couldn’t breathe. Turns out she’d been trying to get my attention the last part of the game because she needed a break and was having a hard time catching her breath. I asked why she didn’t just run over and tell me or the other coach that she needed to come out and she replied with “I was worried the ball would come my way and get past me and they’d score.”
Talk about making dad feel like a heel!
After being able to rest for about 10 minutes, she was back to her normal bouncy self and was happy they’d won. It didn’t seem like asthma or anything, she was just wiped out.
The rest of the weekend was spent doing the normal weekend-suburbanite chores. I did manage to wipe out the front page of a website I’d been working on. That was lots of fun. Thankfully because I had the page still loaded in a browser, I was able to create it with minimal fuss and had it back online within 20 mins. Hopefully the owner of the page didn’t notice.
And hopefully this will make me start doing backups more often!
Working with Drupal
Mar 25th
I’ve been working on a new site, and I decided to build it using Drupal. Many (OK, none) of you know I’m a big fan of Expression Engine, and are probably wondering why I’ve decided to torture myself with a new CMS. I have a few reasons:
- It’s FREE as in beer (ExpressionEngine costs $99 for a personal license)
- It supports members
- I like learning new things
- It seems to have a strong developer and user community behind it
- Never hurts to have ‘experience developing with Drupal’ on a resume
It’s been a long, slow learning curve. I should throw steep in there as well. I’m sure like Expression Engine, I’ll have an ‘a-ha!’ moment or two. The problem I’ve had lately is trying to sit down for a quite hour or three and dig into it.
I had some time last night so I was playing around with it. If you’re new to Drupal, one of the first modules I suggest installing is CCK (Content Construction Kit). This module allows you to insert fields of any type where you want them. I’m creating a site for writers, which will allow them to post short stories for review. Rather than a typical Title field and Body field, I wanted a place for a summary. This is where the CCK module comes in. Now when someone submits a story, they have three fields: The Title of Your Story, Summary and Your Story. I will probably change these fields to sound better, but you get the idea the flexibility the CCK module gives. There’s so much to this module that I’ve only barely scratched the surface of it.
Otherwise, it’s been trial and error, trial and breaking, breaking and fixing, getting frustrated and giving up, and then having a thought and going back to it. It’s a long process, but I’m starting to feel like I’m making a bit of headway. Once I have the fields in place, and the comments working, then it’ll be putting it into a layout I want. And THAT will be a serious challenge.
Bits
Mar 16th
Two posts in the same month? Yes, apparently hell has frozen over.
I’m going to concentrate on writing more again. I do like to write, but as mentioned in the previous posting, facebook has been sucking up my time. I’m going to try and make a status update just once a day, and only check it once (ok, maybe twice, once in the morning, once in the evening) during the day as well.
Everyone have a nice weekend? I had a dinner theater performance Saturday night that was a lot of fun. It was one of those mystery theaters where the audience gets to ask us actors questions trying to gather information about who committed the murder. It was quite a lot of fun. Because of the nature of the play, there were very few lines I had to actually memorize. Mostly it was facts one where my character was and other tidbits that could lead to clues. So our answers weren’t scripted, they were all improv. Which in itself was challenging and quite a lot of fun and I can’t wait to do it again.
After my performance, I picked up my friend Eric and we went to a poker game. I actually won the game, taking in $140. It was a twenty-dollar buy-in, so not a bad return on my money. I was pleased with how I played, and considering when it was just down to three of us, and I had two big blinds left, I think I did well. And caught some good cards.
The rest of my weekend was chores and working on Drupal. Which is a chore in itself! It has quite the learning curve, and if I had the money, I’d be buying Expression Engine to use for this site I’m working on. But I don’t and the economy being what it is, I opted to go with Drupal. I have a few friends who are big fans of it, so that helps when I get stuck. Hopefully it’ll click and I’ll understand how it works soon. Otherwise, my head is just going to get flatter from banging it on the desk.