Daily Archive for September 30th, 2008

After a lot of work..and research..and back and forth communication with an ITEC member here at NC State, I was finally able to get Drupal installed and running on the EOS web server.

Unfortunately they have disabled many very useful features in the Apache server settings in order to eliminate potential security hazards.

As it turned out, all that I needed to do the whole time to get Drupal working (other than some permission modifications, creating new folders since Open Base Directory usage was restricted and a few others) was to temporarily rename or remove the .htaccess file.

After that the setup completed, the .htaccess file was restored and everything seems to be fine.

Now that Drupal is running I’ve had time to inspect the control panel and I really must say that Drupal is far from user friendly when compared to WordPress.

It was actually a little frustrating to navigate through and content posting tools were in my opinion less than useful. I expected to find a nice text editor similar to the one found in WordPress for posts or pages (TinyMCE), but as it turns out there is only a text area (resizable, woot).

Anyhoo, I now get to finish migrating content from the ACM/AITP web site into Drupal so it can be managed more efficiently and kept up-to-date.

Drupal offers a lot of modules which are basically like plug-ins and add new functionality and features to your site such as a calendar or whatever you need.

I haven’t really started working on the theme yet and probably won’t until I get all of the content migrated and general usability of the site complete, but I really hope that the themes are as simple to modify for Drupal as they are for WordPress.

I’ll post some pictures when I complete the site update…or something geeky.