George and Us

I went to the library recently, looking for a new tech topic to learn about. I found a book called, Drupal 7: Visual Quick Start Guide and knew I had found my next challenge. I am experienced with a lot of computer software, lots of web software specifically, but had never played with Drupal under the hood before so this seemed like a good thing to spend some time on. I’ve read a few of the other Visual Quick Start Guides from Peachpit Press and have always enjoyed them. When you want to learn the basics of a software topic in a short time, these books completely rock.

Drupal, being one of the most popular Content Management System’s along with WordPress, DotNetNuke and Joomla, is a very light-weight, modular application. Just like all of the modern CMS apps, once it’s installed and configured and connected to a database on the server, you can do pretty much everything you need via the web-based interface. The book is great because it walks you through downloading everything you need to get started, including the Apache-MySQL-PHP “stack” upon which Drupal runs (the author recommends WAMPserver), as well as Drupal’s core and some really useful modules you’ll probably want to add right away.

In my case, I wanted to learn Drupal use, not installation and basic config, so I opted to install VMWare’s free Player software on my machine, and then downloaded the completely awesome Bitnami Drupal 7.9 virtual appliance. With this combination, I installed VMWare Player, unzipped the appliance and started it up. The Bitnami packages this thing so that  as soon as the VM is fully running, Drupal is ready to go. You just minimize the VM at that point and open a browser and point it it a local IP, like 192.168.1.1 and boom! Drupal!! The Ubuntu Linux login screen inside the VM tells you the IP address to use and your username and password on the welcome screen.

Once you get in there, you can start learning how to admin the site that Drupal runs for you, adjusting things like the Theme in use, the modules that are available, etc… This is for the most part, very easy; just point and click and it’s done. In my experience, compared to the other CMSs I’ve worked with, Drupal is fast and easy to figure out right in it’s own web interface.

Once I got past the very basics of learning Drupal, though, I realized there are a number of things missing in the core Drupal product. For starters, there is no WYSIWYG text editor built in. You have to add a module called WYSIWYG first, and then within that module, you get instructions on how to download and install and configure a specific text editor of your choice. There are LOTS of options, more really than are necessary, but I suppose that’s OK. I’ve read elsewhere that Drupal doesn’t come with a built-in graphical text editor because of licensing constraints and because not everyone wants the same features. On the first part, I can’t believe at least one of the available editor options isn’t licensed using the GPL, as Drupal is, and if so, then why not include it by default and let people swap that out for another only if they want to. Making us start with only what is essentially a plaint-text editor is harsh, IMO.

For what it’s worth, I chose to go get and install the TinyMCE and it’s nice. It was a little challenging to install, since my workstation is Windows and my VM server is running Ubuntu. I used PUTTy’s PSCP copy tool to copy the TinyMCE’s files onto the server, but only after determining the right path. That forced me to go back to my Linux command line memories (wayyyy back) but I did it.

For anyone else thinking of doing this, the path to place the files in was:

Once you get past that hurdle, you can edit posts and pages with the nice TinyMCE editor, you start to notice everything that’s not in there by default. I’ll have to make a list of the things I assumed would there but weren’t, but for now, just get used to the idea that if you’re going to work with Drupal, you’re going to add a lot of extra modules and configure them and then finally use them. Don’t get me wrong, having the option of installing add-ons like image galleries, special-purpose blogs, and so on makes Drupal a very powerful web application platform. It just seems like here in 2011 more of these things would just be there out of the box. If I understand correctly, some the things that are included in my Bitnami distribution aren’t even in the core Drupal install by default, so thank you Bitnami for including the SMTP interface, the Admin toolbar and whatever else you included in there for us!

When I consider the amazing collection of software I downloaded and installed today – VMWare, Apache, MySQL,  PHP, Drupal, TinyMCE, etc… – I am just in awe of the completely awesome nature of the free / Open Source software world. We are very fortunate these people dedicate themselves to making all of these really great packages available for free. I’m going to keep playing with this for a while here, just to learn more about how Drupal can make a web site really shine so maybe you’ll get one more post on the subject in the not too distant future.