Dan Myers » Drupal

Installing APC Opcode cache

Dan — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:10:27 +0000

Today while trying to install the APC Opcode cache on my WiredTree account, I encountered the error “Cannot run code from this file in conjunction with non encoded files in…” As it turns out, the APC Opcode cache has an incompatibility with Zend Optimizer. The solution was to disable the Zend Optimizer (Which wasn’t really optimizing anything to begin with). Just open your php.ini file and comment out the lines that look like the following:

zend_extension_manager.optimizer=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer-3.3.3
zend_extension_manager.optimizer_ts=/usr/local/Zend/lib/Optimizer_TS-3.3.3
zend_optimizer.version=3.3.3
zend_extension=/usr/local/Zend/lib/ZendExtensionManager.so
zend_extension_ts=/usr/local/Zend/lib/ZendExtensionManager_TS.so

Getting started with Drupal modules

Dan — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 17:57:55 +0000

One of the most important documents I’ve found while learning about Drupal is the node_example module. As it’s name suggests, the node_example module gives a user example code for every aspect of creating a module and a new node type in Drupal. If you’re the type who doesn’t like reading, this could be the chunk of code that fast tracks you to Drupal stardom. What’s more, the good folks at Drupal update node_example for every version of Drupal that comes out. Here’s the one for Drupal 6:

http://api.drupal.org/api/file/developer/examples/node_example.module/6/source

Drupal vs. WordPress, why I’m having second thoughts

Dan — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:06:08 +0000

I’ve been working on a CRUD plugin for WordPress for about a week. I’ve got most of what I want in there, but I hit a road block. You see, I want my content to be searchable, so I used the wp_posts table to store the header for the record, and I stored additional data in another table. In wp_posts, I changed the post_type to “contacts” for my records so as to differentiate my data from posts and pages. This is effective, and it’s searchable, however I couldn’t find a way to display my data on the front end.

What I realized is that WordPress would be great if it could load a template according to post_type. Right now, the WordPress theme hierarchy does that for Posts and Pages, but doesn’t allow programmers to add their own entries to the theme hierarchy. It would be great if I could add my own entry to the theme hierarchy that says for the post_type = “contacts” use the theme page called “contacts.php” if that doesn’t exist, use “index.php” just like it does for posts and pages.

Maybe you can do this. I’ve been unable to.

So now I’m thinking… well Drupal does that already. Based on your node type, it’ll load the content using code in your module. In fact, across the board, Drupal is made to be extensible so much more than WordPress. So I’ll make this bold statement, at the risk of sounding naive… WordPress is made for Blogging. Period. It’s designers do not want programmers to make it into anything more than a blog. As such, it does blogging better than any other blogging engine available commercially or openly.

On the flip side, Drupal is a CMS, it’s meant to be open and extensible. However, it takes quite a bit of work to get it to do anything useful. A standard install with no additional modules will leave you wanting more. For example, Drupal doesn’t even have a WYSIWYG editor by default. Recently I’ve discovered a great module for that, but it still doesn’t have the file management (i.e. uploading files and placing links into an article) capabilities that WordPress has. Furthermore, there are NO good themes for Drupal at an affordable price. Granted, I purchased the theme that I use for this blog, it wasn’t free. However it didn’t cost me a fortune either. I’ve found no such theme for Drupal. If you know of one, please do tell.