Major Progress

The site is up and running. I haven’t been documenting everything that I have been doing, as I have been doing a lot of experimenting with the interfaces. The interface is very easy to use and the website truly is feature packed. I will try and recap what I have done with the site, but it is all very straight forward and easy to use.

I enabled most of the modules, including the Blog, Forum, Upload, modules, and given the users permission to use them. This is found under the site building menu.

I created a general discussion forum, and a sub forum for technical support. Only administrators can create entire forums and arrange the forum trees, but any user can create topics and post within those forums. I created a hello thread in the general discussion forum and uploaded a picture.

I began to customize the user menu’s and side bars. Now on the right pane I have a list of the top 5 most recent Blog posts and the top 5 active forum topics. Users can jump to these posts by clicking them, and they will update with each page jump or refresh. On the left hand site, I created a menu called “jump to” which will immediately take you to the forums or your personal Blog. There is also a search form on the left pane that automatically searches all blogs and forum posts.

Some of the other settings that I have set are:

- Set maximum file upload reolution to 1600x1600

- Limit maximum file size per upload to 10mb

- Limit total file size per user to 100mb

- Set Timezone

- Allow users to create new accounts without Administrator approval

- Create a forum and a sub forum

- Allow users to modify their own themes

- Allow users to upload files to the Forums and Blogs

That’s all for now. I will do some more fine tuning and report back.

Ryan

Finally, some progress

Nobody on the Drupal support forums had anything to say about why I couldn't run the Drupal PHP files so today I bit the bullet and decided to start from scratch. I went ahead and attempted a bundled install from xampp. Before I ran it, I uninstalled all of the recent programs, including MySQL, PHP, IIS, and any existing Drupal files.

I download the installable version for Windows from the xampp, and everything went smoothly. It installed Apache, IIS, MySQL, and a few other goodies that probably won't be useful in this scope. I logged onto the server through http://localhost, and it actually worked!

I learned that all of the web content is found in the c:\xampp\htdocs directory. This is the equivalent to the wwwroot folder on IIS. I then copied over the Drupal database files to the c:\xampp\htdocs\drupal folder, and pointed my web browser to http://localhost/drupal. I had my doubts, but it actually worked. I then re-created the MySQL database and the Drupal installation went forward without any error messages.

Now that the install is completed, I can actually start playing with the software. I am not happy about all of the hours wasted by trying to do a manual install, but that is what I get for not doing my research.

Here are the lessons I have learned that I would like to pass onto the next person:

Do not use ISS, use Apache for Drupal.
Do not try to install PHP with the automatic installer
DO use a bundled install package that installs Apache, PHP, and MySQL for you. It practically takes out the entire learning curve.

MySQL Install

The first step in installing My SQL on the server is to download the latest stable release from http://www.mysql.com/. Current version is 5.0.45.

Instructions on how to Install MySQL can be found here:

http://drupal.org/node/266

I noticed http://drupal.org/node/263 that they also list sites that offer install packages that install Apache, MySQL and PHP in one pass. If this does not work out, I will abandon the project and try one of those. At this point, I spent too much time getting PHP to work that I am not willing to start over.

I was able to successfully install My SQL and create a user account with the appropriate permissions.

The next step is to simple in the "install.php" file in the root drupal directory. This is the install script that is supposed to set up your database and create your first user, etc. I cannot get this file to run. It is saying simply that the page cannot be displayed. This leads me to believe that PHP is not working correctly, but I am able to view other PHP files through the web server. I will troubleshoot for a while, but if it does not work I will can the project and attempt Apache. It seems like all of the support documents are based in Apache anyways.

PHP Install

After much trial and tribulation, I was finally able to get PHP working on the server. You wouldn’t think it would be that complicated. Let me start off by telling you what not to do: DO NOT attempt to install PHP by using their executable installation. After trying and failing (twice), I learned that the only way to fly is to download the zipped version that contains all of the application files and do that install manually. I don’t know why they even offer the executable, because apparently nobody on the web can get it to work right either.

Another confusing part of a failed PHP installation is that If IE does not know how to handle the PHP file, which is does not by default, it returns a “file not found” error. It should return an error that says something along the lines of “unrecognized file type” to avoid making you think that you have named the file incorrectly, typed in the wrong URL, or set the permissions incorrectly.

The files can be downloaded from: http://www.php.net/ The current stable version is 5.2.4

I was able to find some EXTREMELY well written manual install instructions here: http://www.peterguy.com/php/install_IIS6.html#phpInstall Did I mention that are EXTREMELY well written? This guy gives an excellent step by step manual install of PHP on an IIS 6.0 server. It involves copying the install files, editing the PHP ini files, and teaching IIS how to handle web pages with .php file extensions. It also has special notes for extensions that will allow IIS to work with MySQL, which we will need in the next step. Some of the steps in his guide (such as the browscap procedures) may not be necessary for our task, but I went ahead and installed everything to ensure compatibility in anticipation of our upcoming additions. My web server is now able to handle PHP files and has compatibility extensions for nearly every software package known to man.

Coming up next: MySQL database

Server found, PHP installed

As luck would have it, I recently replaced an old server from an acquisition site that is currently running 2003 Server SBS edition, so I can use this server for the Drupal install. This will be preferred because I will not have to use anything that is in production, which will let me do server restarts anytime I need without disrupting anybody.

I wasn't sure if I was going to do a fresh install of windows or just clean up the existing install, but after a quick inspection I found that IIS was not ever installed. I figure it already as clean as it is going to get.

My first step was to install IIS and get it up and running. I downloaded an ISO for 2003 SBS, added IIS, and configured a new default web directory called "DRUPAL" . I created a default page index.htm and verified that I could access it over the network. Some permissions needed to be modified to allow anonymous access and directory browsing. Permissions are very lax for the installation process and will be tightened down before going online.

Next, I downloaded the Drupal installation files from Drupal.org. The current stable version is 5.2. Be warned that All of the files on that website come compressed in a "tar.gz" archive that windows cannot recognize by default. I've never heard of that extension before, must be an open source thing. I used Winrar to open the archive and extract into the drupal web directory.

Next up: Installing PHP!