Sourcefusion

All the recommendations for Organic Groups (OG) made me curious. Can I use them for my purposes and safely hand over part of the responsabilities of managing restricted content?

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The current configuration includes many modules, a.o. I18n, Content Access, Views and CCK. With these I’m able to define roles, grant restricted access to nodes based on roles and keep the site bi-lingual (Dutch and English, with the largest part of the content in Dutch). This works fairly well.

On the other hand, assignment has to be done by hand. I haven’t figured out yet how to grant permission to another user to just restrict content to one particular role and I guess I need to build a custom View to see which nodes are restricted, i.e. build my own administrative views. As said before, it’s easy to make a mistake and grant the wrong role to a user. I also haven’t looked into the Drupal forum to see if role-based restrictions are possible. Just had a quick look: the Forum Access module and Content Access are recommended for restricted forums (the first one also allows the setup of moderators).

Although I subscribe to the ideas in the book (see my previous post) that you need to write user stories and follow an architectural approach, my main goal here is to see whether Organic Groups provide features I need in the next version of my website.

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Summer holidays is an excellent time to do some major work on my pet project. Sitting in the shade with cool drinks at hand I started to read a book on Drupal I came across some time ago. This book, Leveraging Drupal: Getting your site done right, turned out to be amazing. It not only explained best practices on how to configure your Drupal site, but, more importantly, how to setup a development environment. Been there, done that and already suffered from bad decisions such as not putting everything in SVN. It’s not feasible right now to do it ‘right’ with a flaky wireless internet connection, but I’ll definitely look into it as soon as I get home.

That didn’t stop me from working on a new theme, which is almost done by now. So with a few days to spare, I decided to look into some other issues, such as the best way to provide private content on the website.
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The update to Wordpress 2.7 goes as painless as described in the docs. However, after importing and editing posts, I always end up with an 500 internal server error. Haven’t found the cause yet. Happens with both a manual upgrade and a clean install from an Installtron script in Plesk. Strange thing is it happens only with the imported posts, not with the newly created ones.

In an attempt to update Drupal to it’s latest version (6.5) I decided to test it on my local setup. Lo and behold, I got an ‘Access denied’. After testing out several possible causes, I googled around.

The answer: a few days ago I setup an SMB share on my home folder, with access for only my user account, no access for ‘everyone’. That resulted in a permissions change on my home folder, even after removing the SMB share.

The solution: sudo chmod o+rx [home folder]

Something I never experienced on my local setup suddenly happened on the production site: random white pages. Consistent in that it was always the same pages (e.g. admin/build/modules), but random because most content pages would show up fine and many admin pages as well.

Digging aroung showed an error in the Apache log:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of X bytes exhausted

I found the answer here: http://drupal.org/node/76156. I added an appropriate ini_set line to settings.php and suddenly my admin/build/modules page showed up.

Finally I thought it was time to move my Gallery2 configuration + albums to the production site. This time making sure that I took the necessary precautions.

Yes, it was uploaded without errors and yes, I could switch off maintenance mode and yes, I could see my pictures and enter the site admin mode etc. Read more »

Drupal is growing on me: I like it more and more and I’m capable of doing much more with Drupal after a few months than I could with Joomla after the same amount of studying.

However, today I spend more than an hour figuring out why I couldn’t get the CAPTCHA module to produce an image on a Webform form.

Finally, after googling around I found the answer: I can’t set it in the edit mode of the form, only in the VIEW mode. So much for subtleness.

During the reinstallation of Gallery2 I also wanted to set the database username to the same name as the production site to have as few differences as possible. I ran into a problem I had before when installing Drupal: the only connection allowed was using user ‘root’. Whenever I used a user with a password who had only privileges on a single database I got an ‘access denied’ error. However, on the production site the installation with a username and password went well and using the username and password and logging in in a terminal using the mysql commandline also worked well.

No idea what’s wrong locally.

I guess I need to settle for manual change when moving from local to production and vice versa.