I originally planned to build my restaurant site and a blog for my family on the same Drupal codebase, I thought it would've been easier to build all the different content types, views, user profiles fields... etc, all in one place. Then, I started to do some research on multisite, and there are some really good posts on how to install Drupal in one place, then 2 sites folders outside of the Drupal folder for added security... but anyways, sites are hosted on 2 separate databases, which makes sense, but that also means what I thought about creating content types & views in one place is wrong.
I decided it's not worth spending more time reading about multisite, and I just rsync the whole drupal folder into a new folder, create a new database and change the settings.php file, run install, and then activate the Backup & Migrate module and then restore from a back up from the 1st folder. BAM, done! (Gotta love that Backup & Migrate module!)
Now though, I'm working on my family blog site and I hit the user profile page for the first time... looks like I can create profile_ fields like birthday, location, favorite_color... things like that... Got a question here, do you guys also enable the "Profile" module in Core and add fields to user profiles? Or do you have some other ways (may be a good module out there or something?)
When I think about I have to redo most of the user profile fields for my other site(s), I thought may be it's a better idea to continue building on ONE site! So may be I can do it this way - create one folder called "test", and use it to test installing modules or anything new / risky, create another folder called "drupal6" which is the base where after modules have been tested are installed here & create all the different user profiles fields, content types, views, taxonomy, panels, themes... etc here! Then, all you need to do to make another site after that is just to replicate that "base" folder & restore from a backup, then delete all the unnecessary content types, taxonomy, views... out of it. Will that work?? What do you guys think?
If you have a good process or a base to start from when you build a new site? Or do you start from scratch every time?
Comments
Don't know if u guys feel
I found it got a whole lot easier to stay focused when I wasn't working for myself anymore. There are several advantages of being an employee over a contractor or hobbyist.
Your proposed process seems pretty complicated. I start from scratch every time. I rarely use multisite unless the sites are to be tightly integrated: sharing users, roles, sessions, and/or taxonomy. and I generally don't share anything more than that. It would be difficult to share content types since CCK creates and drops tables as necessary. You'd need to update your settings.php file every time you added a new content type and for some kinds of field changes. I wouldn't recommend it. Nor can I think of an occasion where sharing content types would be useful. Generally that kind of thing is pretty specific from site to site (i.e. you probably don't need a restaurant content type on your family blog). Now even if you aren't sharing any tables between sites, you can still share the codebase. And that may or may not be useful to you. It does make security updates a bit easier (just update the code in your main install, and then run update.php on every site), but it adds complexity where you then need to fiddle with DNS and/or your hosts file to have all the sites point to the same codebase. There's also greater risks in that some module may work fine on one site, but then you change something and it breaks one of the other sites without you even knowing about it.
As for subdirectories for testing sites, that is a common way to do it. I prefer using SVN though. If you don't want to setup your own SVN repository you can use a free host like http://unfuddle.com/ . I started writing up a description of a simple way to manage your site with SVN, but perhaps that's something I could do for a short presentation at our next meetup.
Dave Hansen-Lange
Web Developer
Advomatic LLC
East Asia Office
Hong Kong
--
Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his
I start from scratch every
Wow really?! Hmm... I suppose repeatedly doing all the steps would reinforce the "how to do things in Drupal" problem... & that would be a good thing for a beginner like me.
Good info! Thanks for sharing.
Yup, I found out about CCK dropping tables when I deleted my "restaurant" content type in the new family blog install. But what's the "update your settings.php file" part? I don't realize you need to run update after adding new content types.
My suggestion was basically to create a skeleton for ease of work... for example, if I had to work in a couple of databases daily, eventually, I would create a template file that would have all of the necessary joins between the tables, so all I need to do is to fill in what fields I need to see & what I need to filter... So, I thought for Drupal, eventually I can do something similar - do a clean install, put in some of the necessary modules, create a few really common / popular content types (blog, reviews), views, user profile fields, forum(?), theme... then use that basic setup as a starting point. When you need to create a new site, then start from there, may be delete something, add something... etc. (This has nothing to do with multisite anymore, I've given up on that idea for now.)
As for our next presentation, so far we have these ideas:
Panels
RSS video + flash hack (Moni)
SVN
What else? Let's gather the ideas and create a poll.
profiles
You can have a look on installation profiles to make your own customization and settings.
http://drupal.org/project/Installation+profiles
Lullabot Podcast - "Does nodes still matter?"
http://www.lullabot.com/audiocast/podcast-64-do-nodes-still-matter
Good info & timing... talks about some of the views stuff that we've been talking about... at 60 mins though, it's kinda too long...
Acquia theming tutorial for artist?
hey guys, still working on creating more contents, content types and views... (not making much progress unfortunately) :( Anyways, I'm trying to get a graphic designer friend of mine to learn about theming in general... but would be nice to focus on Acquia theming as it looks pretty flexible & has lots of different sections built-in! Do you guys have any suggestions about learning theming for an artist type (let's assume he doesn't have much technical knowledge.)
The handbook
As with most documentation things. I think the official Drupal docs are your best source of information.
http://drupal.org/theme-guide
Dave Hansen-Lange
Web Developer
Advomatic LLC
East Asia Office
Hong Kong
--
Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his
When is our next meeting? | Hosting companies...
Moni-Media is hiring here?? Moni, have you been telling your boss more about Drupal? :P
Hey guys, when's our next meeting?! I miss u guys man! LOL
Question - what hosting do u guys use? I use this:
http://skynethosting.net/
Currently on the US Basic Shared Hosting Plan - $4.95 / month - 1GB storage, 50GB bandwidth.
I've been with them for over 2 years now and they have been pretty good at answering my questions - usually within 30 mins!!! The only problem I noticed is that sometimes when I'm doing a lot of developing + refreshing... the server goes down for a while. (500 error) It'll come back up within minutes, but not sure that's "acceptable".
I found them on http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ - pretty good info on there.
For the next meeting, I hope we can pick up on "after CCK and Views2... what are the next steps?" Any ideas?
Next meetup
I'm busy beyond belief for the next three weeks so I won't be able to coordinate, but if someone else can coordinate the dates and location I can still do an overview to SVN.
And I was trying to convince Karim (Moni) to do a presentation on some of his more complex pages for the education site that he worked on, not sure if I was succesful though ;)
Dave Hansen-Lange
Web Developer
Advomatic LLC
East Asia Office
Hong Kong
--
Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his
Venue
I wasn't at the first "official" meeting, but is that venue available on a regular basis? Who would I have to contact to reserve the place for another meeting?
http://www.johndbritton.com
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http://www.johndbritton.com
RSS video + flash
I am ready :)
tar command on Mac exclude ._ and .DS_Store files
Hey guys,
The Creative Common's event is coming up this weekend - http://hk.creativecommons.org/ (Remember to RSVP!) Any of u going? I've got some new flickr schwags from my contact in Flickr, will be wearing these flickr T's w/ my HK Group friends there!
Alright, thought this was pretty cool and would share w/ u guys (& may be u guys have better processes?)
I've used rsync to sync my entire music folder (which iTunes organizes for me), minus the ._. and .DS_Store files, onto my iPod Video... which I flashed with the RockBox firmware. Then just now, I thought why couldn't I do a similar process with my Drupal folder?
So here, I used tar to compress my modules and theme folder inside "all", and I can FTP this onto my host and expand...
tar --exclude='.DS' --exclude='._' -czvpf /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/drupal6/sites/all.tar.gz ../all
not bad, right?
Creative Commons HK
I'll be there on both Friday and Saturday, see you there.
http://www.johndbritton.com
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http://www.johndbritton.com
The first meeting was held
The first meeting was held at Antonio's place in Admiralty. Edison Wong also found a place for us in Yau Ma Tei so we have 2 choices.
I can only make it to Saturday's event, I started a thread here in Flickr's HK group:
http://flickr.com/groups/hongkong/discuss/72157608246545437/
My Google Reader suggested this Drupal feed to me and here's a pretty good one:
http://www.devlounge.net/publishing/how-to-make-a-magazine-style-homepag...
One of the comments is pretty good: "Why not use Panels instead of having to worry about the layout in the theme?"
Multisite users and profiles
Hi there,
I am planning to build a multisite architecture for my project. My need is to have different users and associated profiles across each site. I don't have prior experience working with multisite. Could anyone tell me if this could be done?
Thanks in advance!
Swati.