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!
So for the past few days I have been up to my ears in Drupal. I am finding the overall setup and implementation easier than I remember although it certainly is time consuming to learn and get things just right. The biggest thing I would say is finding a theme that looks somewhat decent to motivate you to start working on the site layout and suck. I have a few in there that look decent, I was on Black Mamba for a while but have settled in on Acquia Marina for the time being made by the guys over at 
Just tonight however I did stumble upon this article: 
