A Ghost of Daisies

Okay…there are still a few little things like changing the favicon, but the website is now open for business.

I have to go to my internship in a moment, but I thought I should commemorate the website’s competition. In the last long stretch, I put in 43.25 hours to pull it together. It’s unbelievably heavy with modules to just get basic functions working, which is frustrating, but my lack of knowledge about php probably has a lot to do with it. What I look forward to most are having my browser tabs back to myself and typing in my website address without it trying to auto-complete for the broken Drupal tester website.

I followed these three pages for help:

• The very basic hand-holding steps.
• The video that explains how to install Cygwin.
• How to find your home directy. Hint: type in pwd

THANK GOD! I’ve noticed that most people in the Drupal community aren’t the friendliest or most willing to help, so it was a relief to finally learn how to do patch files.

I spent about an hour today working on this for the Drupal website and finally figured out this bug:

Add this to your css file and make sure to change the colors to your own schemes!

/* Change the font color in the Google Map (GMap) pop up info bubbles. */
div.gmnoprint {
color: #000;
background: #fff;
}

/* Change the link colors in the Google Map (GMap) pop up info bubbles. */
div.gmnoprint a {
color: #3879d9;
}

WARNING:

If you change the background color, it also changes the transparent color behind the zoom in buttons and credits in the Map window.

Good luck!

I haven’t been updating as of late because my soul is slowly being sucked into the crater that is the Drupal testing website. I spent nearly the entirety of my Spring Break working on it with little to show for it. However, today I began to make progress and created some menus and links as I played around with it. I think I’m on the event horizon and soon it’ll start to get all gravy and I’ll just flow into the zone where I know how to make it work.

At least I hope so.

Today’s adventure at work involved me completely breaking my Drupal installation. My workbook told me to go ahead and download and install the CCK module. There’s just one little problem: it completely broke my website.

My steps were as follows:

I uploaded the CCK module to my Drupal install and enabled all the options listed under CCK. When I clicked Submit/Save, I got an error 500. So I hit the back button and deselected all the CCK items. Now nearly ALL my administrative tools are gone. I can’t even find the link to put my site back online! This also took out my ability to make new content pages, add/delete modules (there is no longer a link!). I even deleted CCK from my server but still nothing.

Over on the Drupal forums, someone suggested that I “empty the cache tables.” My boyfriend worked with me on this part and in the end the website broke even further. So tomorrow I’m going to delete the whole website and start over again. I’m pretty aggravated.

I have been updating as much of late because I’ve been pretty busy between school work and my assistantship. Then today I was sending out (what felt like) dozens of emails to various teachers, the county district’s school librarian head, librarians, AND sent in my application for reference internship. I was so wiped out that I came home and slept for a few hours. So onto progress on the two websites I’m doing for my job!
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As part of my graduate assistantship, I am building a website for a project connecting international librarians. However, in order to get started on following my bosses’ specifications, I needed a content management system (CMS) that could handle the work and be easy to update for a non-programmer like myself. After a tip from a close friend, I started investigating Drupal and found out that it is used by the White House and the group that is paying me for my work. With this reassurance, I decided set forth on my journey.

The first thing I needed to do was to learn about Drupal. I choose Teach Yourself Drupal in 24 Hours which is not the best edited book. However, it’s a starting point. The next part was to install Drupal on my 1and1 hosted server. Below are the steps that took me two hours to figure out:

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