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.

Director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) and producer Ridley Scott (Alien, Gladiator) team up to offer this candid snapshot of a single day on planet Earth. Compiled from over 80,000 YouTube submissions by contributors in 192 countries, Life in a Day presents a microcosmic view of our daily experiences as a global society. From the mundane to the profound, everything has its place as we spend 90 minutes gaining greater insight into the lives of people who may be more like us than we ever suspected, despite the fact that we’re separated by incredible distances.

I liked the humanity here a lot. I think most everyone will. Take some time and watch it. Feel good about living in this time on Earth.

This delicious plate was called the Signature Pork dish. Mmmmmm …

Home depot had almost everything we needed: the PVC pipe, the PVC cement, the connectors and most importantly, the o-ring which creates the seal between the sliding parts. We setup a sheet in the garage and built the gun in about an hour.

Assembly is pretty straight-forward. You use the PVC cement to glue the tee onto the handle, then the inner pipe parts together. They go together easily, since this is PVC, and it’s easy to read the directions provided by the web site. Before you know it, you’ve got an almost working water gun.

Getting the o-ring to fit just right was the hardest part. The one we bought at Home Depot wasn’t really thick enough so it wasn’t holding water at first. We did what every reasonable person would do in this situation: instead of going shopping and finding the right o-ring, we wrapped the inner pipe with duct tape until it started working.

The gun held together pretty well but not awesomely well. It fires very well as long as its holding water via that ring. As the duct taped got worn out, the seal stopped working and the water stopped shooting out of the gun. Re-applying the tape worked for a little while. As the tape wore out too, it made it hard to push and pull the gun to load it with water. We learned a lot with this project and it was fun while it lasted. The gun will work much better if I ever buy the right o-ring so we’ll see if  I can find that online next.

Footnote: it appears the Waterzooka web site is offline while I write this. I don’t know what happened but I hope the maker made some money, had a ton of fun while they ran that site. Thanks much to whoever that was!