My personal notes on all things technical and factual....

Tue, 25 Oct 2011

/SW/business/Drupal: Drupal Migrate Module Basics

The Drupal migrate module[1] is an impressive tool for migrating databases from other web applications (or anywhere, really) into the Drupal database. It even has fairly impressive documentation[2], but not unlike a lot of other big chunks of documentation, it can be hard to extract from the documentation where to start in creating a simple functional example of the migrate module at work. Hopefully this example will help to fill that gap a little.

First install and enable the migrate family of modules in a sandbox Drupal site:

drush dl migrate migrate_example migrate_extras migrate_ui
drush en migrate migrate_example migrate_extras migrate_ui

If you then point your browser at:

drupal/?q=admin/content/migrate

you will see the migrate module's UI, which shows a couple of example migrations ("beer" and "wine") already coded and setup for you by the migrate_example sub-module. You can play with importing and rolling back data with the UI, or with drush:

drush help --filter="migrate"

To create your own migration, you need to create a custom module containing the migrate code. Using a MySQL database from another application, and based upon the beer.inc example from migrate_example, I was able to get a working migrate setup with three fairly small files in a new sub-module called "migrate_test" in sites/all/modules/migrate/migrate_test/ :

sites/all/modules/migrate/migrate_test/migrate_test.module:

sites/all/modules/migrate/migrate_test/migrate_test.info:

sites/all/modules/migrate/migrate_test/langex.inc:

Note that this is a "cross-database migration"[3]. The source data and the destination data are located on the same MySQL server, but in different databases.

[1] https://drupal.org/project/migrate
[2] https://drupal.org/node/415260
[3] https://drupal.org/node/1014558

posted at: 09:13 | path: /SW/business/Drupal | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 18 Jul 2010

/SW/business/Drupal: Youku & Tudou Videos in Drupal

For websites targeting users in mainland China, one of the issues is that many common services like Youtube and Google Video are blocked / censored from within China. For this specific case of video, there are a number of similar local Chinese video services that can be used instead.

Most ex-China video services seem to make it easy to embed their videos in other sites by prominently displaying a button which will generate the javascript code necessary for embedding a video in another site. For whatever reason, the Chinese sites do not seem to be so helpful.

First of all, in Drupal, turn on the PHP module. Then select "Create Content" and some content type to get to the content creation page. Select "PHP code" in the "Input Format" sub-section. And finally, for a youku[1] video, paste the following code into the content area:

This is the video generated by the above:

Youku video links are of the form http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTkwNDgzMjE2.html

Note the part between the "id_" and the ".html", ie. XMTkwNDgzMjE2. This is the part of the link that must be swapped into the above code for XNDg5MTMwMDQ in order to make it work for a different video.

Similarly, for tudou[2] videos, use this code:

which produces this video:

Use a Flash Player to play Video from TUDOU - http://sites.google.com/site/annuairevin/flash-reader

Tudou video links are of the form http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/eD1xQ0WTlI8/

Swap "eD1xQ0WTlI8" in the latter link for "rsOg3YPXjDg" in the code above to make the code work for a different video.

[1] http://www.youku.com/
[2] http://www.tudou.com/

posted at: 07:02 | path: /SW/business/Drupal | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 30 May 2010

/SW/business/Redmine: Installing Redmine on Debian Linux

I have found Redmine to be extremely sensitive to the Ruby environment, often requiring that librairies be of exactly a certain version (not older, not newer). Configuration documentation is not sufficiently detailed. And error and diagnostic information is extremely difficult to obtain in a typical hosting account.

So if you are trying to install Redmine in a hosting account that supports Ruby on Rails, you would be well-advised to get the application running first in a controlled environment where you have root. In my case, that was my Debian Linux desktop. After flailing around for hours in the hosting account, everything simply fell into place when I went back to basics and installed the Redmine application locally.

These[1][2] were the main references for getting this working on Debian.

apt-get install ruby rake rubygems libmysql-ruby
gem install rails -v=2.3.5 (takes quite a while!)
gem install rake -v=0.8.3
gem install hoe -v=1.3.0

Checkout a fresh copy of the latest Redmine stable, currently:

svn co svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/redmine/branches/0.9-stable redmine-0.9

Start the native Ruby web server and see what happens:

cd [...]/redmine-0.9
ruby script/server production

At this point I got a complaint about a missing database.yml. In my case, I was actually migrating Redmine from one hosting account where it suddenly broke, to another hosting account. So I installed the MySQL database from the old account to a database called mentage_redmine, then created a config/database.yml as follows:

production:
  adapter: mysql
  database: mentage_redmine
  host: localhost
  username: mentage_redmine
  password: ***********
  encoding: utf8
 
development:
  adapter: mysql
  database: mentage_redmine
  host: localhost
  username: mentage_redmine
  password: ***********
  encoding: utf8

Restart the server: this time an "Internal Server Error" that gave very specific instructions about adding a line pertaining to cookies to the config/environment.rb file. After adding this line, it basically worked.

In my particular case, again because I was migrating an existing application, in the new site I replaced the public/images, javascripts, stylesheets, and themes directories with those from the old site's public directory. After that, everything looked right as well.

[1] http://www.redmine.org/wiki/1/RedmineInstall
[2] http://www.redmine.org/wiki/1/HowTo_Install_Redmine_in_a_home_directory_on_Debian

posted at: 11:30 | path: /SW/business/Redmine | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 29 May 2010

/SW/business/Redmine: Installing Redmine in a Hostgator Hosting Account

To their credit, Hostgator[1] actually provides some documentation[2] about getting Ruby applications working in their hosting account. I, however, found them to be inadequate, and debugging information availability was little to none, so for me the magic key was getting Redmine working first on my desktop, then migrating to the Hostgator hosting account.

One of the first things one notices when looking at the rather sparse Redmine installation manual[3] is the need for specific versions of a number of Ruby librairies. This is what I found:

My Debian Desktop Hostgator Account

rails (2.3.5) rails (2.3.8)

rack (1.0.1) rack (1.1.0)

rake (0.8.3) rake (0.8.7)

hoe (1.3.0) hoe (2.6.0)

In the Hostgator account, I got the above librairy versions using "gem list --local". I then installed in the account the correct versions as follows:

gem install rails -v=2.3.5
gem install hoe -v=1.3.0

Now transfer Redmine from desktop to Hostgator, placing it in /home/mentage/redmine-0.9.

In /home/mentage/public_html, create the following symlink: redmine -> /home/mentage/redmine-0.9/public/

Hostgator is using Apache to server up Ruby applications. Create a public/.htaccess[2] file with the following contents:

AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi 
     AddHandler cgi-script .cgi 
     Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI 
  
     RewriteEngine On 
     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/notrails.* 
     RewriteRule .* - [L] 
  
     RewriteRule ^$ index.html [QSA] 
     RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]     
     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f 
     RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]

After that, it worked for me by pointing a browser at the redmine directory.

[1] http://www.hostgator.com/
[2] http://forums.hostgator.com/ruby-rails-support-t13038p8.html
[3] http://www.redmine.org/wiki/1/RedmineInstall

posted at: 13:08 | path: /SW/business/Redmine | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 11 Jan 2010

/SW/business/Drupal: My Favorite Drupal Modules

(As of Drupal version 6.x....)

Drupal is a very mature piece of software, with a vast number of modules to choose from, often with multiple modules vying to provide the same piece of functionality. After some trial and error, here are my candidates for "best of", modules someone new to Drupal should look into early:

First some easily overlooked core modules:

PHP filter: useful even if you do not know what PHP is (the language that Drupal happens to be coded in). There are a number of modules out there promising to "make it easy" to incorporate things like Youtube videos and Google Adsense ads into your site. You do not need those modules, because all you need to do to make this happen is to copy a bit of Javascript from the source site into the editing page for the node or block where you want the ad or video to appear. Generally speaking, Drupal will ignore user-entered Javascript, unless you turn on "PHP code" in the "Input format" section.
Taxonomy: If you need to organize content into categories, this is where you go.
Trigger: On the admin page there is an item called "actions" where you can define things you want your site to do automatically. And then under "trigger", you can specify the criteria for when that action will be taken. For example, this is the mechanism by which my sites send me an e-mail when a new comment has been posted and I need to take care of the moderation queue.

Third-Party modules:

Content Construction Kit (CCK)[1]: one of the modules that truly sets Drupal apart from the competition. The basic function of CCK is to allow the user, via the Drupal GUI, to create custom databases within Drupal. Which is to say, you can add custom fields to any content, and control read/write access on a per-field basis.
Views[2]: Views and CCK usually travel in a pair, since Views allows the user (via Drupal GUI) to construct and display custom queries of almost any data in the Drupal database. As a very simple example, Drupal does not come equipped with a comment RSS feed, and one can easily create such a feed with Views.
Image[3] / Image FUpload[4]: the image module seems to be the standard way to add photo upload and management to a Drupal site. The image module supports bulk uploads via FTP. If you wish to do bulk upload multiple photos using the Drupal site, add the "Image FUpload" module.
Lightbox2[5]: drop this module in for elegant AJAX "lightbox" displays of photos and galleries. ("Lightbox" refers to a standard effect where, if you click on a photo in a gallery, the whole page fades to a dark gray background while a white box pops up in the middle to display the photo. Delete the box and the background page brightens and again becomes the foreground.)
Boost[7]: As a web application Drupal can sometimes be a bit of a resource hog, particularly if there are a lot of modules installed. If the host server is a bit light on memory, the result can be sluggishness. Boost is very simple in concept: pages referenced by anonymous users are stored in an Apache cache, such that when cached pages are served up Drupal is taken completely out of the picture: no PHP or MySQL overhead, your website performs like a static site. Until the cache expires, of course, and pages have to be regenerated once per caching period.

Here is someone else's list of favorites[6].

[1] http://drupal.org/project/cck
[2] http://drupal.org/project/views
[3] http://drupal.org/project/image
[4] http://drupal.org/project/image_fupload
[5] http://drupal.org/project/lightbox2
[6] http://www.nicklewis.org/40-essential-drupal-6-modules
[7] http://drupal.org/project/boost

posted at: 03:40 | path: /SW/business/Drupal | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 17 Dec 2009

/SW/business/Drupal: Comparisons of Drupal and Joomla

Back some time ago when I was trying to figure out which Content Management System to use for a couple of website development clients, I do not remember seeing any definitive reviews. In the end, I think I made the correct choice (Drupal) for the situation despite the limited amount of information, but I see now that there might be some situations (event calendaring? desire for a simpler admin interface?) where Joomla might be the right choice.

Here are some references I would like to preserve for posterity:

http://www.alledia.com/blog/general-cms-issues/joomla-and-drupal-version-2/
http://www.topnotchthemes.com/blog/090224/drupal-vs-joomla-frank-comparison-ibm-consultant
http://www.communicopia.com/blog/joomla-versus-drupal
http://www.goodwebpractices.com/other/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal.html

posted at: 13:16 | path: /SW/business/Drupal | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 07 Dec 2009

/SW/business/Drupal: Drupal User Manual: How to Edit Content

This post aims to provide the basic knowledge required to begin editing Drupal content.

First and most basically, you require an account on the Drupal website you wish to edit. After login, if you click on any menu item to navigate to that page, if you have the privileges to edit that page, you will see an edit (编辑) button or link (this depends on the theme being used) at the top of the page. Click on edit / 编辑, then edit and save the page.

After you have logged in, if you have been given some admin privileges on the site, you will see an Admin (管理) link in your personal menu under "My account" (我的帐户). Another way to see and edit the pages on the site is to click on "My account" / 我的帐户, and then click on "Content management/Content" (内容管理/内容). You will then be presented with a list of all the content items on the site, which you may then choose to edit individually, or perform various bulk operations on (deleted large quantities of spam posts, for instance).

To create new content, click on "Create content" (创建内容) and select a content type. For ordinary website page content, you probably want to choose "Page" content. After you click on "Page" and write your content, do not forget to expand the "Menu settings" (菜单设置) and enter a "Menu link title" (菜单链接名称) and select the menu position from the "Parent item" (上级菜单项) dropdown list. (You probably want to select "Primary Links" or one of the items under "Primary Links".)

Finally, you will probably want to re-arrange the order of the "Primary Links" in the navigation menu at the top of the site. To do this, click on "Admin" --> "Site building/Menus" --> "Primary links" (管理 --> 站点构建/菜单 --> "Primary links"). To change the order or position of menu items, just grab the "+" with your mouse pointer and drag'n'drop. For dropdown menus it is also good practice to click the "Expanded" (展开) checkbox to enable submenus. And finally, click "Save Configuration".

posted at: 04:17 | path: /SW/business/Drupal | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 14 Oct 2009

/SW/business/SugarCRM: SugarCRM Built-in Data Tranfer Tool is Highly Developed

SugarCRM is fundamentally a big, complicated address book, and any migration to SugarCRM can often reasonably include a wish to import a bunch of contact data from another application. In my case, I have a MySQL database.

To get this database into SugarCRM is basically a two-step process:

First compare Sugar's existing Account/Contact fields and the fields in the database to see what matchs and what does not. Then in the Admin section of the user interface, use the "Studio" application to create new custom fields where necessary, by clicking on "Fields" under "Contacts" and/or "Accounts". And then do not forget to add those new fields to a form in the corresponding "Layouts" subsections. Click "Save & Deploy" and you are done.
Then export the MySQL database table into a .csv file (phpmyadmin works well for this) click on the "Accounts" tab in Sugar, then "Import" to process the .csv file. In the resulting display, just match up Sugar fields with the fields in the .csv file, then click "Import Now". Several iterations of this may be required to repair bad fields in the database, mainly messed-up e-mail addresses. Once the accounts are imported, just repeat the same process by clicking on Sugar's "Contacts" tab and "Import" to strip out the contact information in the same database. Note that selecting the same "Account ID" when importing an account and its matching contacts allows the contacts to continue to be associated within Sugar, under the same Account.

This all works quite well as of SugarCRM version 5.5. 5.2 does not work so well: e-mail addresses do not import as they *all* trigger a syntax error, Account/Contact association is lost, etc. If you are doing a substantial data import I recommend you go right for the not-yet-stable version 5.5. It is a release candidate so it will be the new stable very soon.

posted at: 05:31 | path: /SW/business/SugarCRM | permanent link to this entry

/SW/business/SugarCRM: SugarCRM Upgrades

With "normal" PHP web applications, upgrading is a matter of downloading a tarball containing the new version of the application, unpacking it in the web root, and then running an upgrade.php script inside the new version to update the table structure of the back-end database to the new layout.

Not so with SugarCRM, and it is slightly non-obvious what the upgrade procedure might be. The first thing you notice when you download a tarball is that there is no upgrade (or update) script. Some poking around in the admin portion of the user interface leads to the discovery of an "Upgrade Wizard", so one's first instinct is to feed the afore-mentioned tarball (actually, in this case, a zip archive) into the Wizard. This does not work, and in fact complains about a "missing manifest.php script" in the archive.

In fact, what this wizard is looking for is a specific kind of file: an "upgrade" or a "patch" zip from sugarforge. And this somewhat buried page is where you need to go looking for these things:

http://www.sugarforge.org/frs/?group_id=6

posted at: 02:18 | path: /SW/business/SugarCRM | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 09 Sep 2009

/SW/business/KnowledgeTree: Installing a New KnowledgeTree instance

If this is a first install on a new server, this guide[1] is a must read. Some of the highlights:

apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-curl php5-mysql mysql-server mysql-client xpdf zip unzip catdoc pstotext

apt-get install python-reportlab python-imaging python-uno antiword sun-java5-jre sun-java5-bin lynx openoffice.org-java

And do not forget to bump memory_limit up to at least 64 in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini.

Get the latest source tarball from here[2][3].

In your desired web root, make a copy of knowledgetree for this instance, then sim link a simpler name, ie.

tar -xvf ktdms-src-oss-3.5.4a.tgz 
mv kt-dms-oss/ kt-dms-oss-3.5.4a
ln -s kt-dms-oss-3.5.4a/ knowledgetree

Give ownership to the web server process:

chown -R www-data:www-data kt-dms-oss-3.5.4a

Create a new MySQL database for the new instance:

#  mysql -u root -p
Enter password: mr4gvc7s
mysql> create database apps_kt;
mysql> grant all on apps_kt.* to 'apps_kt'@'%' identified by 'password';
flush privileges;

Edit config/config.ini to agree:

dbName           = apps_kt
dbUser           = apps_kt
dbPass           = password
dbAdminUser      = apps_kt
dbAdminPass      = password

Now import the database from sql/mysql/install:

mysql -u root -p apps_kt < structure.sql
mysql -u root -p apps_kt < data.sql

Separate out the configuration and the data:

mv knowledgetree/var/ kt-var
mv knowledgetree/config/config.ini kt-config.ini
cd knowledgetree
ln -s ../kt-var/ var
cd config/
ln -s ../../kt-config.ini config.ini

Now login to the new KnowledgeTree instance with the default:

user: admin
password: admin

and change the admin password.

Anticipated path for upgrading to a new version of Knowledgetree:

create a copy of the code of the new version
check for changes between the old config.ini and the new one
symlink (ln -s) var and config/config.ini in the new code to the old location in the top-level directory
run the upgrade script: knowledgetree/setup/upgrade.php
move the symlink for the short name (ie. knowledgetree) to the new copy of the code
test the new code
if the new code is broken, move the short name symlink back to the old code, and hopefully it should still work and down-time should have been just minutes.

[1] http://wiki.knowledgetree.com/Debian_4_Installation_Instructions#Grab_a_few_more_packages
[2] http://www.knowledgetree.com/try-now/knowledgetree_open_source_download
[3] http://www.knowledgetree.com/products/opensource/downloadopensource

posted at: 12:46 | path: /SW/business/KnowledgeTree | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 04 Aug 2009

/SW/business/SugarCRM: A Simple SugarCRM API Class

This should give anyone needing to use the SugarCRM API a quickstart:

And the following is a simple example of how to use the above class to create a simple contact record with a name and an e-mail address, and store it in Sugar's Contacts database.

To find out all the possible fields in the Contacts database, use this script:

Many thanks to this post[1] for getting me on my way.

[1] http://systemsconsciousness.com/2009/04/10/sugarcrm-soap-examples/

posted at: 08:14 | path: /SW/business/SugarCRM | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 31 Jul 2009

/SW/business/SugarCRM: Introduction to SugarCRM API

Documentation sucks. Their wiki[1] is flat-out wrong. Thankfully the blog world has some good information[2], though beware older posts are often obsolete and also will not work. This example should hopefully quickstart you and get you past the first crucial step of login through the API:

I think this code is quite self-explanatory. If it does not work, uncomment the var_dump of the login response, which will tell you the error string you are getting back.

[1] http://www.sugarcrm.com/wiki/index.php?title=SOAP_Intro_and_Practical_Examples
[2] http://systemsconsciousness.com/2009/04/10/sugarcrm-soap-examples/

posted at: 08:54 | path: /SW/business/SugarCRM | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 13 Jul 2009

/SW/business/Drupal: The Relationship Between Content & Menus in Drupal

If you edit a content or a menu item in drupal, you will see a "Menu link title" and a "Parent item" field in both of these editing windows. This is your first clue that the contents of menus come from at least two different places:

A piece of content (a "page", for instance) created on the "Create Content" (node/add) page. If you create or edit a page, between the Title & Body fields there is a "Menu settings" section. If you click into that there is a "Menu link title" field where you specify the precise text of the menu item (what it is called) and a "Parent item" drop-down menu where you select the position in the menu structure. ("Primary Links", for instance.) After you create such content, specifying a position within the "Primary Links" menu, this page will also now be automatically listed when you edit the Primary Links menu at admin/build/menu-customize/primary-links. In other words, the same "thing" is both a piece of content ("page") and a menu item.
"Pseudo" content. This is a Drupal convention of where to find certain kinds of content. If you click "Add Item" on admin/build/menu-customize/primary-links, you will be taken to a page that looks similar to the "Menu settings" section if you edit a content page, with the addition of a "Path" field. If you put "node/x" (where x is an integer referring to an already created page of content) the new menu item will point to an already existing page of content. If you put "blog" in the "Path" field, then the menu item will point to an aggregation of all blog posts on the site. "blog" is the path where Drupal developers have designated that such content is to be found.

So to summarize, most normal "menu" items should probably be content that you create on node/add, and there specify a position in one of your pre-defined menus like "Primary Links". For certain things like the blogging function and the contact form function (where the path would be "contact") you need to create the menu item by clicking "add item" within admin/build/menu-customize/primary-links and filling out the "path" field appropriately.

For sites fitted with dropdown menus, to get 2nd & 3rd level menu items, in the "Parent item" field you have to place the lower level menu items under the higher level items. And then click on all the "Expanded" check boxes on admin/build/menu-customize/primary-links.

posted at: 11:36 | path: /SW/business/Drupal | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 02 Jul 2009

/SW/business/Drupal: Multi-Site Drupal: Trivial

First install one site, say for domain1.com, just like it was a single-domain install. Settings for the first site will automatically be placed in the sites/default directory.

Now configure Drupal for a second domain, domain2.com. Create a second MySQL database for domain2. Copy /sites/default to sites/domain2.com and edit sites/domain2.com/settings.php. In this file there is a line of this form:

$db_url = 'mysql://username:password@hostname/databasename';

Replace the username, password, and databasename with the values for the database you just created for domain2. hostname should not change because you are presumably using the same MySQL server.

Then point your browser at:

http://domain2.com/install.php

From here on everything should look very familiar.

The result is each website installed under the sites directory in Drupal gets it's own completely separate database and file area. The only thing shared is stuff put in sites/all (some modules and themes can be shared, for instance) and the Drupal code. Separate databases mean that each site must be upgraded separately on Drupal upgrades.

There is reportedly a way of putting all the sites in the same database, but this only simplifies upgrades, while perhaps complicating other aspects of management. I have seen mention of sharing data between sites in this latter case, but it is not yet clear to me how this might be done.

posted at: 12:52 | path: /SW/business/Drupal | permanent link to this entry

/SW/business/Drupal: Dropdown Menus in Drupal

As of Drupal 6.12, they are not built-in....

One possible solution is to install a third-party module: the "Nice Menus" module[1]. This will provide a block in the admin/build/block window, which can be positioned in any one of your themes' defined areas. The resulting menu is, however, extremely plain out-of-the-box, and needless to say is not integrated with your chosen theme.

If you are looking for dropdown menus, a better solution is to search Drupal's many third party themes[2] for "dropdown". This results in four pages of results, many of which are quite elegant. When you first install one of these themes, however, the dropdown menus may *seem* not to work. Here is some house-keeping that must be done for a newly-installed dropdown-menu theme to get those menus working:

Some themes have a block layout area in admin/build/block called "suckerfish menu". In this case, you need to assign either the primary or secondary links to this area, to have them displayed as dropdowns.
If you are using primary links, for example, all menus items listed on admin/build/menu-customize/primary-links should have the "expanded" box ticked.
The vast majority seem to work for me, so if it does not seem to work for you, something probably needs to be tweaked in your configuration.

[1] http://drupal.org/project/nice_menus
[2] http://drupal.org/project/themes?text=dropdown

posted at: 12:31 | path: /SW/business/Drupal | permanent link to this entry

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