| The Great Drupal Web blogging project, Part 1 |
by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (Dec. 28, 2005)
I may be good at some things, but I'm lousy at making Web sites. Oh, I know my way around HTML, and I'm decent at Macromedia's Dreamweaver, but just because I know how to paint, doesn't make me Van Gogh.
So it is that when I looked at my sad little Practical Technology Web site, I decided it was time to try something different.
But what?
I decided that my first problem wasn't that I'm a klutz at Web design. No, my biggest problem was that I don't have the time to manually put up a decent-looking Web site.
So, it was that I decided to put up one using a blogging-oriented CMS (content management system). By that, I do not mean using an existing CMS like Blogger or Live Journal. I mean actually setting up my own instance of a CMS on one of my Linux servers.
I know it's not everyone's idea of a fun way to spend the break between Christmas and New Year's, but hey, it works for me.
So, the first thing I needed to do was to decide what I'd use. Now, I could have tried rolling my own CMS with, say, PHP-Nuke or Slashcode, but remember what I said about my skills as a Web designer? I have about the same level of abilities when it comes to PHP and Perl.
Thus, I ruled out the CMSs that require a good amount of technical expertise. The goal, after all, is to come up with a Web site that requires minimal time for yours truly.
I looked at some other CMSs, such as Plone/Zope and WordPress, but I wasn't sure where to go.
So, I asked some of my fellow tech journalist buddies at the Internet Press Guild what they used. Robin "Roblimo" Miller, who keeps an eye on a little Web site called Slashdot, suggested that Drupal might fill the bill.
He uses it himself for his personal site, and one of our comrades, Bob Young, founder of Red Hat, uses it for his current company, the publish-it-yourself powerhouse Lulu.
I then did a spot of research and decided that Drupal seemed liked it was the ideal combination of power and ease of use, with WordPress a close second.
Having decided to give Drupal a try, I needed to make sure I had everything I needed for it to do its stuff.
You can run Drupal with a variety of Web servers and DBMS engines, but to make life easy on myself I decided that I'd go with the latest stable release, Drupal 4.6.5.
I then took a long, hard look at the program's requirements.
All too many folks assume that all LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and the scripting language of your choice that starts with "P") components work smoothly with each other.
Wrong. Oh, so wrong.
My Ziff Davis Internet companion, Sean Gallagher, tells the tale in his blog, Buzzword Compliant, of what happened when some WordPress users discovered that the latest editions of PHP 5 and MySQL 5 have limited backwards compatibility.
For WordPress 1.x users, the results were a mess when they upgraded either one and tried to run their blog software.
I decided to avoid that. Life is too short.
This, by the way, is not a unique problem for LAMP developers. Every one gets stuck with this one sooner or later.
The Drupal 4.6.x line supports PHP 5, and I've decided to stick with MySQL 4.x for now. I rather like MySQL 5's feature set, but again, I'm not here to work out a possible database application glitch, I'm here to get a site up, so I'll stick with the older version of the DBMS for now.
Next, I needed to decide which version of Linux to run it on. After much thought, I decided that even though the "smart" thing to do was to run it on either SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) 9 or RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 4 -- after all, I know both heavy-weight servers well, and I'm already running both of them as production servers on my network -- I would instead give Ubuntu, specifically Kubuntu, the version which uses KDE instead of GNOME as its interface, a try.
Now, if I relied on my Web site for my daily living. I wouldn't have done this. Not because I had any doubts about Ubuntu. It's because you should always stick with what you know works, when trying out anything new. It makes bug-tracking a heck of a lot easier.
Still, I went with Ubuntu, because I keep hearing good things about it and I've never tried it myself. I already know the Debian family well, and I'm very fond of the Xandros and SimplyMEPIS Debian distributions, so I figured I couldn't go too far wrong.
So, I downloaded the latest stable version, Ubuntu 5.10, aka the Breezy Badger, and burned it to a DVD.
While I was doing this, I also decided which of my systems to devote to the job of Drupal server.
In the best of all possible worlds, I would have put Drupal, PHP and Apache on one machine and MySQL on another. I've also been a big believer in putting only one heavy load application on one server. No where do I feel this is more critical than with DBMSs. Any DBMS can, with the right load, drive any system to a crawl. I also take this position because I don't believe in putting all my application eggs into one basket.
But, while I certainly have more computers than most people, I don't have so many that I can devote two machines to project Drupal, so I've elected to start the system up on a 2003-vintage HP a250n that I'd been using for a test system.
The a250n comes with a 2.6 GHz Pentium 4 processor. This chip comes with hyperthreading support and an 800 MHz front side bus. For graphics it has a NVidia GeForce4 MX 440 AGP graphics board with 64MB of DDR memory, not that I expect to be doing much with graphics on this project.
It also has 512MB of dual-channel DDR SDRAM, a 120 MB Ultra DMA hard drive, a Fast Ethernet NIC, and DVD and CD drives. In short, while it was no speed-demon even when it first came out, it's a decent box and should have more than enough horse-power to run a modest, less-than-200,000 hits a month, Web site.
I hope.
Tune in next time, as I start putting all these pieces together and report on what happens next in my do-it-myself Web site project.
 About the author: Ziff Davis Internet senior editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been using and writing about technology and business since the late '80s and thinks he may just have learned something about them along the
way.
(Click here for further information)
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