As any of you who are following me on twitter know I ordered the beautiful, sleek and very white Soundblaster Arena headset last week from newegg and today I moseyed my way down to Puralator to pick em up!  Happy happy joy joy.

Seeing as there are little no reviews of these kind of things specific to linux I thought I would share my thoughts on the first day with my new lover and how they react to my other lover: Ubuntu.  I’m not going to go over packaging and all the other nitty gritty details that most reviews dive into, I’ll just let you know the one thing you care about: How do they sound?

Well up until now I’ve been using  a pair of Panasonic earbuds (Best pair of ear buds I have ever owned for bass which is saying a lot as these cost me 30,000 pesos – 15$ – in Colombia and they out perform my $200.00 Bose buds sitting in my room) and the sound has been fairly impressive up until this point so it would take something pretty special to really make me say ‘wow’.  Obviously an over ear headset is going to outperform buds but the quality of those buds was so high with the music I listen to that I wasn’t sure at how much to expect.

First Impressions

In linux, to be honest, the difference isn’t astronomical as far as what they are delivering.. Clearly these things are 10 times the size of ear buds so the overall sound is a lot richer and a bit boomier when it comes to the progressive house I listen to.  Putting on classical the sound is a fair bit cleaner although it going to take something at 320k to really hear the difference in sound.  Again because it’s an over ear experience the sound comes through richer as well.

In windows you can take everything written above and multiply it by 10.  The sound is insanely deep and booming when the equalizer is adjusted.  These things rattled on my head and massaged my soul with amazing thumping beats.  It’s enough to make me almost want to go into Windows to do as much work as I can.  Shit that sound was impressive..  I made sure only to take a taste of it though, just a few seconds or else I would probably be in Windows right now.  So keep in mind non of the limitations I describe here have anything to do with the hardware, this is a badass headset.  It all comes down to the lack of proper support and drivers for linux.  GGAHHH!!!

Volume

Now this is a USB only headset and I am guessing that is playing a part into why I am unable to really crank these things.  I mean don’t get me wrong it goes moderately loud but it doesn’t pound my head like when I had my Bose set which plug directly into the audio jacks.  I mean I can feel the beats but it’s not leaving my ears ringing after a long session of Jan Waterman which is the only way to listen to such brilliance. I am able to amp it up more through pulse for classical music than I was with my buds but with trance it starts to distort when I dance around 170%.

As you can guess it the same cannot be said for the windows experience.  These things fucking exploded on my head.  It was so loud, so deep and so bloody distortion free that I had to shed a little tear for not being able to experience that in linux.

The Microphone:

Truth be told one of the main reasons I’m buying this is the mic.  I haven’t done an IndustryBroadcast in months and months and month because my old usb mic kicked the bucket.  So a critical criteria was mic quality and most of the reviews had nothing but good things to say about the mic.

First thing that rocks about it is that it is detachable.  So if I’m out or whatever and don’t need it, I don’t need to have it sticking off my head.  Definitely like that.  The quality of the sound is decent.  It’s nothing amazing by any stretch, and this has nothing to do with the software as it sounds the same in windows.  My voice comes across as really damn deep, almost unnaturally so for those who are used to hearing me through my built in lappy mic, and while they claim this is a noise canceling mic, when I was in windows with the proper drivers loaded and software running I really didn’t pick up a crystal clean sound even though all windows were closed and appliances off in my surrounding area.  It was dead quiet in my apartment and i was still getting a bit of noise that I had to clean up with Audacity.  So overall the mic works decently but I wouldn’t buy these just for that.. If you’re doing podcasting you’re better off getting a proper mic and a proper pair of headphones.  If you’re gaming then these will definitely do the trick and make you sound like a manly man while you’re at it.

Size, Shape, Comfort

My ears are totally covered, I picked these up at 2pm today, and outside of a workout and dinner I’ve had them on ever since.  Totally comfortable, no pinching or anything anywhere.  Cushioning is soft and fluffy and I have lots of room inside for my ears

The Design:

See picture above, these things are badass!  I bought these because they received the best overall review of any gaming headset around and they were under $100.00 at New Egg.  I also haven’t bought a SoundBlaster product in 15 years so it felt awesome to support a company that’s done so much to change the audio landscape of the digital world.  But I am not going to lie and say I wasn’t super super stoked to have this gorgeously designed throw-back to 1980′s sci-fi on my head.  I mean if storm troopers are grooving to good tunes they are doing it with the SoundBlaster Arena on their head, and dammit so am I!  This goes for the color and general shape, but these bad boys are sleek and not bulky by any stretch.. I was actually surprised at the small size of the box when I picked them up.  I was expecting, from the pictures, that these things would be much more obtuse and large but they are the perfect size.  That and the black on a white body is brilliant.  Best looking headset on the market in my mind.

So there you have it!  If you want something that just cranks the sound out and you are using linux only I would go for a Senheisser or something else that goes into your audio jacks.

• The sound quality is good in these,  overall decent but nothign to write home about and my ears certainly aren’t going to be bleeding(in the best way possible) anytime soon.  I’m almost considering running VMware all the time just for music because these things absolutely rock in Windows.  So if you’re a windows user put your money into these bad boys, they will rock your world like nothing else.
• Mic is decent, good for gaming, decent enough for podcasting but nothing to write home about at all.  If you’re serious about casting go and buy a professional mic for $70.00 and use a cheaper $30.00 headset.  If you are gaming this is the way to go.  The mic detaches which is a huge plus
• Design rocks the cock, these are wicked looking phones that set your head apart from the rest
• Comfortable as anything else.  But phat padding around the ears with plenty of room will keep the tunes coming for hours and hours without discomfort.

Hope that helps, if anyone has any suggestions for how to improve the audio quality to something approaching windows I would love you forever!

So it seems that I’ve had a similar experience to a lot of people changing their wallpapers in ubuntu.  You’re scrolling through a bunch and in the list you notice this one called cosmos that doesn’t quite looks like the rest.  “Hmmm, what’s this?’ you think.  This looks like a bunch of images stacked on top of each other.  Could it be?  And yes, it is, it’s a multi-image slideshow that can have as your background that rotates on a schedule that you choose.  I immediately sat down and started figuring out how this thing works and in the end it was pretty simple, time consuming to setup as you have to input a ton of values into an xml file but simple.  I’m not going to go into huge detail about how it works if you want to read more head over to http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/create-custom-transitioning-background-your-gnome-228-desktop

So today I stumbled upon a motherload of amazing 3D space art at http://joejesus.deviantart.com and I go completely gaga over space art.. My wallpapers are all sci-fi scenes, I just can’t get over how breath taking some of these are.  So I raided the guys stash and ended up with around 30-40 new pieces for my wallpaper slideshow and like hell was I going to enter all of these in by hand so off I went searching for a nice little script that would do it for me.  I mean come on, one of the reasons I’m a linux user because I gave up the notion that time consuming repetitive tasks were something that you had to do by hand and sure enough I found a wonderful gentlemen over at the ubuntu forums who coded up a beauty of a script that worked like a charm.  So make sure to head over to : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9578962 and give the guy a big thank you hug for saving you hours of work, and read the instructions on how to use it.

Here’s the script, just copy and paste this into a file, chmod it to 755 and you’re off to the races:

#!/bin/bash
echo “<background>”
echo “  <starttime>”
echo “    <year>2009</year>”
echo “    <month>08</month>”
echo “    <day>04</day>”
echo “    <hour>00</hour>”
echo “    <minute>00</minute>”
echo “    <second>00</second>”
echo “  </starttime>”
echo “  <!– This animation will start at midnight. –>”

if [ $# -lt 4 ]
then
echo “usage: $0 <hold duration> <fade duration> file1 file2 …”
echo “example: $0 60 5 /path/to/dir/*.jpg /path/to/dir/*.png”
exit 1
fi

hold=$1
fade=$2
first=$3

#remove hold parameter
shift
#remove fade parameter
shift

while [ $# -gt 0 ]
do
echo “  <static>”
echo “    <duration>$hold</duration>”
echo “    <file>$1</file>”
echo “  </static>”
echo “  <transition>”
echo “    <duration>$fade</duration>”
echo “    <from>$1</from>”
if [ $# -gt 1 ]
then
echo “    <to>$2</to>”
else
echo “    <to>$first</to>”
fi
echo “  </transition>”
shift
done
echo “</background>”

HTTP://WWW.NETVIBES.COM

In my experience with talking with folks that are much more tech savvy than I, one of the most surprising things is how few people know about Netvibes, even more surprising is how few people in the world actually use this brilliant free resource.   I’ve had this post in draft forward for well over a year now but after sitting down with an old friend who is a Mensa candidate with computers when compared to me and realized that even he has never heard of netvibes I decided to finally finished this bad boy.

So what is netvibes? Well to quote Wikipedia(as I so often do):

Netvibes is the first personalized dashboard publishing platform for the Web including digital life management, widget distribution services and brand observation rooms.

What the hell does this mean layments terms?  Well to quote http://hubpages.com/hub/What_is_Netvibes:

It is a service that allows users to set up their own customized start page composed of “modules” which can contain a wide variety of information from dozens and dozens of other sites. One of the most obviously useful things to include in a module is an RSS or ATOM feed of a popular blog or news service. Since RSS updates in almost real time, this allows users to, at a glance, arrange a customized list of news from a wide variety of sites all on one page.

Got it yet?  In short, and in my experience introducing others to netvibes, it will single-handedly change the fundamental way you use the internet.  Before Netvibes when I wanted to go and check my news sites one by one, bbc.co.uk, cbc, reuters.com, slashdot.org, etc etc.  I would spend about an hour a day and probably get through 10-12 sites and read about 5-15 news articles. With netvibes I currently have about 70 news, tech and science sites, along with 80 or so blogs covering business and video game development and finally my favorite DJ’s.  Think this would be overwhelming, are you already thinking that you wouldn’t use this anyways because who can handle that much information?  Well think again, the problem with the information we have online isn’t that we are presented with too much of it, it is how it is presented.  Believe it or not but Netvibes does such an amazing job at presenting it to you that you never feel overwhelmed.  Ever, infact i feel far more overwhelmed going to cnn.com and trying to find stories I want versus going to my general news section and browsing the headlines from The BBC, Cnet, CBC, CNN, The Guardian, Truthdig, The Register, Castanet, CTV, and finally TED.   It’s literally that good and it will literally change the way you interact with the internet.

An Example of a simple Netvibes layout

Obviously underneath all of this is RSS feeds.  If you don’t know what an RSS feed is just click on that orange icon directly underneath ‘Subscribe’ on the left side of this page.  You will be taken to the RSS feed for this site and all updated websites today will have an RSS feed hiding somewhere.  What Netvibes does is parses the information from as many RSS feeds as you want it to, organizes it into modules which you can customize, vary how many feeds are showing up, how they are displayed.  It makes it easy to take it at one glace, scan the headlines, mouseover what interests you and then I just middle click to open all the stories in new tabs.  I’ll queue up 10-15 stories, read em, and then queue up another 10-15 stories, rinse and repeat.  Most sites will even have RSS feeds for specific sections so on CNN for example I don’t have scan through the latest bullshit Celebrity dish to find actual news.  My list of sites and feeds has certainly grown over time.. Every time I stumble across a site for the first time and love the content I’ll grab the RSS feed and throw it into the mix.  It probably started with 8-10 news sites and now it’s well over 100, the best part is that it never gets overwhelming as the more sites I add the more I organize them and create separate tabs within netvibes for specific content (IE: tech or Spirituality).  You can go to http://www.netvibes.com/netflow and take a peek at how I have my setup and organized.  As you can tell by the above link you also have the ability to share some or all of your netvibes with the world

Another Layout

On top of handling RSS feeds netvibes has a plethora of widgets that you can plug into your page.  I have weather forecasts for various cities around the world, my good spreadsheets are tied in, todo lists and it even checks my gmail and hotmail.  As I mentioned before, Netvibes completely changed the way I interact with the virtual world and I consider myself fairly net savvy.  I’ve become more efficient, more organized and the amount of information I take in every day has increased 10 fold.  All thanks to this one free brilliant little service.

Widgets Galore

Well this was a jolly good problem that took 4 hours to fix.

I’ve implemented the Audio Module this week to allow our Sound team to upload soundtrack, foley and effects work just the same as the 2D and 3D guys upload their work.  Unfortunately when I went to upload a 40MB .ogg file the connection to the server was reset pretty much exactly after 60 seconds.  So, easy enough I figured I’d just have to go into my php.ini file and change the max upload sizes, max connection times and all of that fun stuff.  Well I went through and changed every conceivable directive in there that had anything to do with connection times and upload sizes.  Nada!  I created .htaccess files in the /drupal dir with php_values to the same effect.. Nada!  I went to one of my wordpress blogs and tried to upload the same file and guess what?  SAme thing happened, re-assuring me that this wasn’t a drupal only problem.  So I tried increasing the Timeout value in apache, nada.  Got onto IRC on #php and no one had a clue.  Hours and hours of googling led to ZERO solutions.  It wasn’t until I decided to try this in Opera instead of Firefox that I was able to get a glimmer of understanding as to what was going on.  Just to once again re-iterate how much better of a browser Opera is than firefox, how exponentially better in every conceivable way except for compatability, Opera is compared to firefox, it took me 30 seconds to figure out and solve this problem once I had opera loading the pages.  Instead of just sending me a nebulous Server Connection Reset error after 60 seconds like FF did, Opera immediately spat out a 413 Error ‘Entity too large’.  Why Firefox didn’t touch on client_max_body_size 300M;

this at all, ever is beyond me but it was a simple matter of going into  my nginx.conf file and “setting client_max_body_size” to 300M and the problem was solved.

Sooo, if you are experiencing a Connection reset error while trying to upload files and you just happen to be running Nginx go and check out your nginx.conf file and make sure client_max_body_size is set nice and high.

Or is it?  because for a long time trying to install a few editors for posts and content I saw nothing!  My first foray was with FCKeditor, which was rough around the edges and ended up having a major major bug in it.  Ugh, so annoying.  When you went to edit a post it would briefly bring up the contents on the original post and then replaced it with the html code in its entirety of the front page.  Not sure why and it really only surfaced today, so perhaps something else I did caused this to happen but either way out it went.

I’ve also been forced to remove /misc/jquery.form.js entirely which limited some of the editor modules I could use.  However I found out the secret with getting a good working WYSIWYG editor in drupal and that is to NOT use the editor modules at all.  Instead go out and get the WYSIWYG API and follow the instructions carefully.  It makes a huge huge difference because I tried CKeditor next and guess what?  It was a complete mess, wouldn’t load anything, just crapped out.  I would say this is because of my muching around with the jquery stuff, however when I use the WYSIWYG API and then go grab the CKeditor files from: http://ckeditor.com/ , load it into my /sites/all/libraries/ directory and have the API load it up it works like a charm.  Not only does it work like a charm but this editor is saawweeett.. Definitely recommend CKeditor for you and all of your friends.

So I went in and deleted all of the other editor modules and now I have a perfectly functional editor for all my stuff and my drupal install is shaping up nicely.   I know, I know I said I would get to the SVN but the inability to edit posts properly grabbed my attention here.. So now I’ll pitter patter and get at er!

One last thing, I was having trouble with putting images into posts and then upon previewing them not having them show up.  Turns out that if you don’t have full html set as your input type then this doesn’t work, so I just had to go in and set full html as my default input format.

The first Obvious yet overlooked thing I just got around to setting up with a module called ‘Comment Notify’

Comment notify is a great little module that I didn’t even think about over the past week and a half of drupal setup but it is such a common sense one that I wonder how it was overlooked.  Especially when considering the way the forum’s are setup.  This module was actually quick and painless to setup.   You just head over to http://drupal.org/project/comment_notify download it, install it and then the configuration is pretty straight forward if you follow the directions.  But without your users will not be able to subscribe to forum threads and with it everyone can be auto-subscribed to their own comments which is great to keep the team communication going full bore.  Something that is so important when you are organizing people around the world

The second Obvious but Overlooked aspect of my setup was the fact that as an admin my view is going to be different than my teams view.  For some things this is a no brainer like admin menu’s and configuration screens, however when I am outside of the administration area of Drupal I just assumed that everyone would be seeing what I am seeing.  Not so much.  After writing a big long instructional article on cataloging submissions and organising assets I had one of my team members inform me that half of the links and buttons I referenced in the article didn’t exist for him.  So I created a quick dummy account, granted it the same perms as the other users and lo’ and behold I had 1/2 of the menu’s than with my admin account.  I just had to go through the roles and permissions setup for the users and grant them all access to the modules that they needed to use but definitely something to check after you spend a week going nuts and setting up a flurry of features.  Double chck that your users have access to them

So the 1/2 a chapter is accounted for because of a little upgrade that needed to happen on jquery UI.   You should do this regardless of if you’ve encountered any bugs but I started to receive errors telling me that ui.core.js is missing.  In which case you’ll need to install the latest version of jquery.ui and following these instructions: http://drupal.org/node/376325

Now the next thing on the agenda was that I wanted my team to be able to log in and have a portion of the sidebar dedicated to showing the last 10 images uploaded by anyone else on the team.  I fooled around with a module called featured content, but that went no where.  Next was a module called Views Showcase, which was supposed to show this cool ass showcase highlighting the latest items on a node.  That also didn’t work as the instructions were 3 years old and the views module has changed too much since then.

Now, I’m not sure if I installed a module that made this appear, but suddenly when I went into the blocks config I noticed a ‘latest images’ option there which I promptly configured and dragged into the sidebar.  Viola!  Just like that I now have the latest images on my front page.  Huzza!

PS:  There are two things that you want to make sure of here.  First is that you didn’t install the jquery update module which gets drupal to grab and use the latest version of jqueury.  Even if yo uremove /misc/jquery.js completely this module will override it and you’ll still be stuck with this html error.

The second thing is that you can also look to the /misc/jquery.form.js for a solution.  If it is still going on head over to : http://jquery.malsup.com/form/#download and download the latest version to your server.  Might help

If you were thinking that the Drupal excitement was going to let up as we progressed then you are definitely in for a treat because it’s still as troublesome wrangling this CMS to do exactly what I want it to as before.

Because I’ve spent the past 2-3 years working with Dotproject I’ve come to expect certain features in a PMS.  For example, I want my crew to be able to attach WIP’s if they are commenting on a task that they are working on.  This way the conversation can be contained all within the PMS and you dont’ need a second system to talk about the task that you are working on.  Well Drupal doesn’t do this.  The thing with Drupal is that you can only attach images, or files in general to things that create nodes.  Image nodes, pages, books, etc etc.  Well with Storm the way that you update your task is by filing out a Time Tracking sheet or by commenting on it.  The problem is that comments don’t create nodes unto themselves they are tacked onto existing nodes, meaning that uploads and attachments aren’t allowed.  Funny enough the same goes for the Forums.  In an oversight that is almost embarassing the Drupal forums don’t allow you to attach files or images to any replies to an original post, something which all forums have been doing since the dawn of time.   There is however a nice comment attachment module that you can install, although that wasn’t without it’s challenges.

Firstly, for whatever reason the comment attachment module figures that it needs to stick the files in /system/files/images or /system/files .  The problem here of course is that this directory doesn’t exist.  IT is not part of the drupal install at all, no other module creates or needs it, but for some reason the comment attachment module figures this is where files go, when in fact they are being uploaded to /sites/{yoursitename}/files or /sites/default/sites as is specified by drupal.  So I could have gone through the module files and found where the hell the reference to this phantom dir was but instead I just hopped into my server and made a sym link to it.

# cd domain.com/drupal

#mkdir system

#cd system

#ln -s ../sites/{mysitename}/ ./

and viola, all of a sudden the comment uploader module had somewhere to throw it’s files and they all ended up in the same place as the other upload modules in drupal.

So this solved this problem, the module is actually almost 1/2 working now, key word ‘almost’ .  You first need to go into content types and find all of the content types that you want to enable the file uploads for the comments.   The forum is one obvious one, but I just went to every content type that is used frequently.  Posts, books, tasks, etc etc.  You have to configure each one, go down to the comments section and enable file attachments or uploads or whatever it is called.  And Viola!  You should have comment uploads… Key word here is ‘should’ because of course you still don’t.

The attach option now shows up on the comments, and sure enough you can click on the browse button and open a window to find the file that you want to upload, and sure enough you can start the upload process but right when it finishes you will see a beautiful error message saying “html error 0: /comment-upload/js”  .  Awesome eh?  Yea, I thought so too!  So now we figure out what the hell is causing this problem and it turns out that an asshole of a javascript is doing it because if you have NoScript installed in Firefox and you set this page and completely untrusted guess what you can do?  That’s right boys and girls you can upload and attach to your hearts content, which means that some jackass javascript is being a jerk.  Time to find out which one it is!

Now on my page I had the following scripts loading:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/misc/jquery.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/misc/drupal.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" defer="defer" src="/modules/admin_menu/admin_menu.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/insertFrame/insertFrame.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/rounded_corners/jquery.corner.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/storm/storm.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/storm/storminvoice/storminvoice.js?S"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/storm/stormperson/stormperson.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/storm/stormproject/stormproject.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/storm/stormtask/stormtask.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/storm/stormticket/stormticket.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/storm_dashboard/json2.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/storm_dashboard/storm_dashboard.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/misc/collapse.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/storm_quicktt/storm_quicktt.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/storm_quicktt/jquery.timers.js?S"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/tableofcontents/jquery.scrollTo-min.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/tableofcontents/jquery.localscroll-min.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/tableofcontents/tableofcontents.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/webfm/modules/webfm_mp3/mp3player/audio-player.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/modules/fckeditor/fckeditor.utils.js?S"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/misc/textarea.js?S"></script>

Now considering that basically everyone and their brother’s dog is bitching about Jquery fucking up everything it touches I tried renaming /misc/jquery.js to /misc/jquery.js.bak and you’ll never guess what happened next?  My image attachment/uploader module works.  I figured that some jquery is better than none, so I went over to http://docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery , grabbed all of the older versions and started trying each one to see how far back I would have to go to get one that worked.  I simply download them all into my /misc/ directory and renamed them from jquery-1.4.js to jquery.js or whatever the version number was.  I had to go all the way back to version 1.2 before it stopped giving me that lovely error message.  I lost my fancy uploading progress bar but at least it works.

So ya, that has been my fun for today, I now have a fully function forum and PMS in the sense that I am used to.  Scratch those from the list!   Now I dive into the wide world of the SVN.  I feel this is going to be the most demanding, and most rewarding setup so far as a well setup SVN involves a fair bit of learning and understanding.  And if I can’t do it well then why bother at all so off I go to learn!

Alright, what is this, day 10 since I started up the Drupal install, although really only day 5 since I’ve gotten serious with this beast.  The love affair has certainly been rocky but there might be an end in sight.  Today is the first day that I’ve gotten enough of the underlying systems in place that I am able to actually use one of them to help manage my team.   That’s right, I’ve officially crossed the line from setting up drupal 100% to using it.  It’s about a 80/20 split now between setup and usage, but still a start!

Day  4 was spent mostly trying to get a File Manager to work.  In the end I really settled on IMCE as it just had a shit ton more functionality to it with a lot of supporting modules made.  Oh, just so you know the two main choices are:

IMCE: http://drupal.org/project/imce

WebFM: http://drupal.org/project/webfm

Again, the reason I chose to go with IMCE, although WebFM had some promise is that IMCE just looked more robust with a lot more features.  In the end however it didn’t matter as IMCE didn’t work at all.  I was able to browse the file system with it, but uploading wasn’t going to happen.  The module installed fine, but the upload button, while clickable, didn’t do anything.  I also installed the IMCE_swfupload module that allows multiple uploads but that two didn’t work.  There was a fair bit of research done all over the place both in IMCE and with swfupload that led to no solution whatsoever and after 6-8 hours I called it quits on this module.

On the bright side WebFM does allow me to upload, however it is limited to single file uploads which really does make the module fairly useless as I may as well just attach them to notes,pages, books or whatever I am working on.

Now in regards to that 20% work I was able to do with Drupal it involved inputting some tasks into Storm.  Although this only came after a fair bit of wrestling.  Mostly because I stumbled across the Storm Conrib Module which adds a lot of functionality to Storm as well as the Storm Dashboard (which is so useful that I am scrapping the Rites of Spring theme all together in favour of a non-fixed width theme).  The problem was that a whole shwack load of modules needed to be added in order for these to work properly.  Notably the mysterious ‘Content’ module, which is notoriously hard to track down.  Trying doing a search for ‘Content’ under the modules section and see how many results come up.  I’ll save you some time and tell you that when you see a module that requires ‘Content’ it is actually referring to CCK or the ‘Content Construction Kit‘ .  Once I figured that out things started to slide a little smoother.  Actually a lot of modules will need CCK so you’re well off just to install it by default.  The ‘Date‘ module was also needed and so I plopped that into my drupal as well.  Lastly for my Project Management it is critical that my team members are notified when they are assigned new tasks or their current tasks are updated.  This one was a little harder to track down as it isn’t an official module yet but if you scroll down here: http://drupal.org/node/637852 you’ll be able to find it.

The vast majority of my work was trying to wrangle with IMCE and WebFM, which in the end was frutiless and I’ve decided to just go down the incredibly more complicated route and install a full SVN on my server.  Of course I’ll need to then teach my team how an SVN works(after, of course, I tech myself how an SVN works).  On the bright side there is a Drupal SVN so I’m keen to see how it integrates into Drupal.  My first order of business after the SVN is setup and running on it’s own is to watch this video: http://gotdrupal.com/videos/drupal-cvs-svn-setup .

More fun awaits!

Alright, the nightmare of getting a fully integrated Wiki into Drupal is finally over.  Hopefully some lucky soul finds this and saves themselves the literal days I spent getting this up and running.  At the end of my last post I mentioned a few links and articles here and there and I’m happy to report that none of them did the trick.  That being said I think it is still a good idea to go through them and even follow the instructions, whether or not they work, so that you can learn from them.  They teach a lot of stuff relating to input types that is crucial for using Drupal and will be crucial if you want to successfully implement a Wiki system.

First of all, forget about using any media wiki modules, they are all shit.  In fact mediawiki_api is so bad right now that at one point it actually came close to melting my server down.  The entire server, every one of the dozens of websites I run on it came crashing down to a crawl until I totally shut down apache and mysqld in order to manually remove the mediawiki_api module.  There is another Mediawiki filter module that also doesn’t work, again to flaunt how much they don’t work just implementing them and then trying to create content with an input type involving these filters causes whatever you write as content to just show up as a totally blank page.  Actually that mainly applies for the mediawiki_api module, the standard MediaWiki module with preloaded mediawiki filters goes one step further and causes any wiki content created with this filter to spit out an nginx error as it fucks with apache to the point of apache not even knowing what to do with the page.

So what did I do?  Well in the end the solution was really damn simple, it was just a matter of widdling away all of the non-functioning crap that shows up at the top of all the module lists and google searches for ‘drupal + wiki’ .  First off you are going to have to kiss your media wiki syntax good-bye. Well you don’t have to entirely as you can create your own filter sets by hand but to make filters takes time and patience that I was running out of, although I probably will go ahead now and make them anyways on top of what I have.  If you want some instructions on how to do this go here: http://drupal.org/node/217177

In the end the syntax I am using is from PmWiki because the module I am using comes from the kind sir over at  www.interestingto.me.uk.  For a complete rundown of the pmwiki syntax head over to:  http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/TextFormattingRules.  So the first module you want to install can be found here: http://www.interestingto.me.uk/DrupalWikiModule .  Why this isn’t in the drupal module repository I don’t know, it damn well should be.  This is a fairly simple install with instructions on the page.  This is the main one, it actually allows you to use a wiki syntax and produce results that don’t destroy your server.

The other module you are going to want is this one: http://drupal.org/project/freelinking which basically implements filter for the easier creation of HTML links to other pages in the site.  So you can have nice [links] going straight to other wiki articles.  You’ll need to do a bit of reading to see how you properly link to other pages.

The Table of contents is the major reason I love Wiki’s and so you will need to get the Table of Contents module found here: http://drupal.org/project/tableofcontents .  It’s a snap to install and all you need to do after that is add it into your input type and insert a [toc] at the top of your post or alternatively you can go into your input type menu, click on your new wiki filter and then go to ‘configure’ to configure the TOC module to auto-insert a TOC when you exceed X number of headers.

The only thing else I can imagine is a module that allows inline images to be placed like in a wiki, but I’ll tackle that later I think after I wrap my head around how Drupal handles it’s images currently

So that’s that.  The wiki is up and running finally and I can breath a sigh of relief as I thought I was going to have to start from scratch here and reinstall drupal at one point.  I haven’t been able to get any of the wiki importers to work properly so it looks like I’ll just be copying and pasting that stuff into Drupal by hand.. Ah, and that makes me realized I am going to have to manually input the media wiki syntax into my filter because all of my other wiki’s are in media wiki format.. No rest for the wicked it would seem!

Here are some other related links of interest:

http://drupal.org/node/356583

http://drupal.org/node/217177

http://drupal-wiki.com/en/applications

http://openconcept.ca/blog/ethan/creating_a_drupal_6_wiki

http://www.starbowconsulting.com/node/111

http://groups.drupal.org/node/7072

http://groups.drupal.org/node/54688

Hope that helps, onto Chapter 4!!