Author: mary

Looking Ahead at 2009

Belated Happy New 2009! It’s been a while since I posted. I’ve been, as always, busy with real (offline) life, and many online projects. My income generating job has been busy, and now I’m back in school, which hasn’t allowed me much time for much else.

However, I am still here, coding away whenever I get the chance, and learning lots of stuff to share with you. In this brief post I want to talk about what you can expect from the Coding Pad in the coming year:

More Drupal:
I hope that after following my Drupal for beginners series you’ve been able to advance and learn more by yourself in exploring this powerful CMS. As you may recall I based this series of tutorials on Drupal 5. I will do more tutorials on Drupal 5 because of its stability and modules available, but I will also be advancing into Drupal 6 and blogging about that too.

Programming Tutorials:
I really haven’t done any programming tutorials as I initially planned to, but you can expect that to change in the coming year. I have been messing around with a few coding projects and will be sharing these.

Other Content Management Systems:
I will be covering other content management systems besides Drupal (even though it is currently my favorite). Expect to see tutorials and posts about WordPress, MODXCMS, and others.

Random Computing topics: – definitely. I also anticipate that I’ll be talking more about web design topics, software tips and tricks, sharing more resources, and all that good stuff, so hang around and subscribe to stay updated.

I am also hoping for more guest posts, so if you have any interesting topics to blog about related to coding, scripting, content management systems, etc.. send them over, along with a brief bio about yourself and a link

My first big project is going to be overhauling the Coding Pad. One of my biggest gripes with WordPress is the frequent upgrades you must do to keep it secure. I am considering switching the coding pad to Drupal or some other platform, but haven’t made a final decision yet.

Building a Website with Drupal for Newbies – Adding Content

This is the sixth segment in my series of tutorials on building a Drupal website from scratch. I have been working on a lot of stuff and sort of drifted away from working on these tutorials, but I’m back to finish this up. This definitely won’t be the very last Drupal tutorial I ever do. I anticipate that you’ll be seeing a lot more Drupal related stuff at the Coding Pad, but this will wrap up the beginner basic stuff on getting the website completed.

OK,so far we’ve Introduced Drupal, learned how to install Drupal, we then set up and configured a Drupal site, and we went over how to build the Drupal site with blocks, menus, and modules. Finally, in our last tutorial, we talked about content. Recall that I have been working on a website concurrently with this tutorial: The Drupal Pad, and everything in these tutorials is implemented on that site.

So in the last tutorial we looked at the options under creating content,and we discussed the various default content types. So why don’t we go ahead and start fleshing out our website. Recall I said that we would start out by installing the Pathauto module so we would get our urls looking good from the start? I’ve decided to make that the topic of a different Drupal tutorial so as not to get things too complicated. Let’s just go into content for now and we’ll look at Pathauto in the next Drupal tutorial.

Continue reading “Building a Website with Drupal for Newbies – Adding Content”

Building a Website with Drupal for Newbies – About Content

This is the fifth segment in a series of posts on how to build a Drupal website from scratch. In the time since I wrote the last Drupal post, I have been learning more and delving deeper into the power and beauty of Drupal, and will be sharing a lot more in future posts, but these next two posts will wrap up the basics of building a Drupal website.

If you’ve been following this series, we have Introduced Drupal, learned how to install Drupal, we then set up and configured a Drupal site, and finally we went over how to build the Drupal site with blocks, menus, and modules. The site that I have been working on concurrently with this tutorial is The Drupal Pad, and everything in these tutorials is implemented on that site.

In this final section, we’re going to look at adding content to our site. We have a pretty basic website at this point, with a basic front page but not much else.

Drupal comes with some inbuilt content “types”, with the ability to create more. This ability to create and custom design your own content types is one of the things that makes Drupal a really powerful CMS, and we will go more into detail on this later. The two main content types built into Drupal are “Story” and “Page”.

By definition, Stories are articles in their simplest form: they have a title, a teaser and a body, but can be extended by other modules. The teaser is part of the body too. Stories may be used as a personal blog or for news articles. So you could use the story type to create news articles, blog post type of entries (if you don’t want to enable the blog module), articles, etc. On the other hand, a page is useful if you want to add a static page, like a contact page or an about page. I find myself using pages for things such as Site Disclaimers, Terms of Use, etc.

If you enabled the blog module or the poll module, then you’ll have extra content types, the Poll, and the Blog Entry.

Continue reading “Building a Website with Drupal for Newbies – About Content”

Installing razorCMS – Resolving the Internal Server Error

In my last post, Introducing the razorCMS Testing Pad, I discussed this new flat-file CMS and the small website I am building as a way to test and experiment with razorCMS. I installed a barebones system with no extra bladepacks, just the basic system. In this post I will discuss my installation experience. I won’t go over all the installation details since you can find them well documented in the User Manual, which you can download here. Installation, for the most part, is a breeze. Because it’s a flat file CMS, you don’t have to worry about creating or configuring databases or anything like that. You just need to edit one file and you’re good to go. I did run into one small problem.

I followed the manual to the letter but when I tried to load my new site, I got a 500 Internal Server Error:

Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, XXXXXX@maryspad.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Continue reading “Installing razorCMS – Resolving the Internal Server Error”

Introducing the razorCMS Testing Pad

After my post on flat-file content management systems, I learned about a new CMS that started out as a fork of the nanoCMS that I referenced in my earlier post. (You can read more about nanocms and flat-file systems here). smiffy6969, the creator of razorCMS, encouraged me to test his CMS to see how it works, so after much procrastination, I have finally started. I have installed the very basic core of the CMS on a subdomain and called it the razorCMS Testing Pad. I’ve edited the default home page to have some custom text and set the site name and footer.

I plan to add more content, some bladepacks, and just generally see how the CMS performs in terms of speed, functionality, ease of use, and scalability. I will be posting here as I make changes to the site. Because I have a relatively hectic offline life, please be patient if updates don’t come as frequently as they should.

For some background info, downloads, and to learn more about razorCMS, please visit the razorCMS home page. You should also check out the razorCMS forums for support and more information.