Drupal project
From Dar
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About this learning project
The project is emerging from an informal meeting held in London on July 8th 2006.
It was suggested to form a learning group which would be able to develop technical and social expertise in the deployment of drupal for organsisations on a small budget.
An instance of Drupal was up and running the next day, and an experimental reconnaissance phase began.
Contents |
http://distributedresearch.net/drupal/
Feel free to register, experiment, and co-create. I'm trying to configure it so that any registered user can also adminstrate.
So some of the discussion can take place there in the forums and blogs, but a smaller dedicated learning group may also be interested in devoting some time to developing expertise in the more technical aspects of installation, maintenance, and tweaking the social architecture.
In other words, I have grown used to the idea that rather than simply join in, many people will think "that's cool, I want one" !
Shaping the research project
Phases
I don't have an example out in the field with a real community yet, but I have started to think about it, hence the question of whether to start out in a simplified drupal environment consisting only of forums, or perhaps blogs.
This could be a phase 2 of the learning project, with the first phase consisting of the construction of the testbed installation at http://distributedresearch/drupal.
At that one you can see what the blogs and forum structures look like in outline, as well as the books, stories and news aggregator. That's almost certainly overcomplicated for starting up a real community, and serves only as a technical testbed for now. Findings and issues are accumulated on the wiki here, as well as in the drupal environment itself.
looking for a group
The real research starts when we have a sizeable group of people linked by some practical topic, (probably not e-learning) who want to have an online presence which has the potential to grow into a sophisticated communications and knowledge management environment. As I am beginning to see it, this phase 2 would consist of a series of refinements resulting in a level of understanding and an evolved configuration which could then be rolled back and implemented for other similar communities or instances.
support ticket
I had a brainwave this morning and decided that the problem with logged in users showing up as anonymous, error messages in the logs, and the issue with blogging direct from Flickr could well be all related.
So I've sent off a ticket to my hosting service provider as follows:
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Hi, I think you may have some security module in operation which has been set to block access to files called 'x m l r p c' or 'x m l r p c.p h p' and this is now causing me a problem allowing legitimate activity by logged in users.
I also believe that this has been the situation for quite a long time ( at least 9 month) and explains why I could never get set up to send a blog directly from flickr.com to my wordpress blog hosted here at hostservers
I'm currently setting up a drupal installation and this seems to make use of x m l r p c.p h p even for some local authentication events, so the software won't be able to work properly under the present hosting account conditions.
Please could you investigate your automated security procedures to track down the blocking of x m l r p c, verify if this is the case and unblock it for me and anyone else who wants to be able to runs software which handles authentication in what seems to be becoming a standard way now.
Cheers, Andy
**update**
The fact that I couldn't save the edit here if it contained the string "xmIrpc.php" ( l changed to I in order to quote it ) proves that some kind of brute force filtering of that module is in operation.
**update2**
After more than a week I received a reply which suggests some modifications to the .htaccess file in order to bypass the filter. The only trouble with this suggestion is that the control panel limits editing of .htaccess to simple password protection.
Tagging
As the learning project gets underway, perhapas we should adopt a specific tag such as:
drupal4cops
learningdrupal
meanwhile here is a page with some deli.icio.us streams: drupalRSS
blogs
Blogs about drupal rendered on the drupal blogs page
Beverley Trayner]'s blog about an initial meeting: http://btrayner.blogspot.com/2006/07/thinking-of-drupal.html
people
Drupal Community
Conferences:
Planet Drupal, an aggregate of drupal community blogs
Other instances
- Project NML (New Media Literacies)
Interesting site looking at the use of new media in US schools & buiding up collaborative resources. http://www.projectnml.org/
- Webheads in action have a drupal portal, hosted by Worldbridges.
It has a nice clean interface, with many relevant features. Activities are announced, webcasts managed from the drupal site, and particpants can have a blog there. It certainly looks promising and with a lot of features. Not so many people started blogging as most already may have other blogs - but everyone's blogs can be "read as one".
- SPC have started out with the simplest possible site
- Policy unplugged at Web2.0 for good
http://www.w24g-policyunplugged.org/main/
- eMint uses a gateway which sends yahoogroup messages to a drupal forum
http://emint.iandickson.com/drupal/
- defunct edubloggers support community at http://edublogs.org/community/
story at http://distributedresearch.net/drupal/node/27
- Ann Arbour Museum have a very well developed instance.
- Performancing.com
Hosting options
An easy way to get a drupal installation up and running might be to select a hosting service who provides the 'fansastico' one click installation script for many types of popular opensource software, including drupal.
eg: http://www.westnic.net/support/fantastico/
Oustanding Issues
It's time to gather the outstanding problems and wishlists into a list, and then start taking some of them to an expert forum.
Personalisation of blogs
It's hard to imagine users taking ownership of the so-called blogs on drupal, and with Forums, there is little scope for personalisiation of homepage/profiles
The following links suggests a way http://drupal.org/node/35728
Profile page
Similar to the above, how flexibly can a profile page be personalised?
Size of font in wysiwyg text entry box
Text being enetered is too small.
Spam
Spambots have started adding comment and book entries, and the cleanup method is far less sophisticated than Wordpress or mediawiki. Are there good spam fighting plugins developed yet?
Learning Resources
Dgroups_case_study FLOSS Dgroups wiki
Drupal.org handbooks http://drupal.org/handbooks
Screencasts at Lullabot: http://www.lullabot.com/ (eg http://www.lullabot.com/videocast/drupal_actions_and_workflow_video ) and podcasts
Tutorials on Nick Lewis's drupal blog http://www.nicklewis.org/taxonomy_menu/21/177
DreamHost's Drupal Wiki http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Drupal
critics
A bad experience here:
http://soobrosa.wordpress.com/2006/06/27/re-elgg-drupal-and-moodle/
also Tom Smith:
http://www.theotherblog.com/Articles/2006/07/13/drupal-news/
"I sometimes get the feeling that Drupal is very clever but not half clever enough."
Jonathan Furness said...
- I've been using Drupal for many years now and have found it a hugely empowering tool for developing community websites. I would say it still lacks core functionality to run a social online space within it. For example, it's forum tools are very basic, but then it has really only been designed as a content management system which it does incredibly well.
Bev:
One of the things I don't like in Drupal is the forum. I heard that vbdrupal is better for that and I wonder if anyone has used or heard about it:
