In the ongoing search for a Content Management System solution for ITS, I've been working on a Drupal installation over the last week. There were a few challenges, mostly to do with the .htaccess file that came with the install.

The file included a few lines that caused a 500 error, which gave me no Drupal pages, and very little helpful information. I did some research, edited out a few offending lines from the file, and the problem went away. Sort of.

At this point, I had the Drupal framework appearing correctly, but the content was missing- everywhere there should have been profile editing forms or boxes of content, I only got "page not found" error messages, if anything. I assumed the problem was still with the .htaccess files (as if the system couldn't parse the directory structure to find the includes properly), but it turns out that it was easier to solve than that. Finally having a moment of intelligence, I searched for "page not found" in the Drupal support forums and got this tip suggesting that the database tables needed to be rebuilt. I did just that, and it worked like a charm.

Of course, there are still some problems. We can edit content and move blocks around, but changing themes and other such settings still produces errors. At least now Drupal provides better error messages, and points toward our ongoing troubles with the fact that our PHP instance is running in Safe Mode. This has been giving me headaches with other projects (our experiments with WordPress) for a few weeks. Essentially, both tools want to be able to create new directories, which gets complicated by the over-protective safe mode. It's a problem that can't really be solved at the application level, so I'll probably need to ask Web Systems to help.

In any case, this is just one example of the kinds of CMS tools we're looking at, and we need to make a choice sooner than later, so I probably won't spend much more time on Drupal for now. Next up, Mambo…