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Learning: Enjoying The Acquisition of Knowledge
Learning is something that all of us probably do all of the time, both consciously (by reading newspapers/books/adverts/BBC website) and subconsciously(from surroundings etc.). However, when you want/or need to learn about something new, or to develop your knowledge on certain aspects what is the best way to go about it.
Open Source CMS for SMEs, NGOs and Charities
I recently presented at theNetSquaredCamb Meetup group. Here are the presentation slides OSCMS for SMEs, Charities and NGOs.
Getting the right server for you!
Getting in the right server for your business; one that will be capable of managing all of your requests and give you space to grow without costing the earth or having a facebook like amount of servers is a tricky bit of business. Here is a quick overview of differing servers and their benefits and disadvantages.
VPS (Virtual Private Servers)
Are servers located on a virtual environment within a host machine. Regularly these have less powerful specifications than a dedicated server and are largely used for website hosting/development server hosting.
Benefits:
Choosing the right hosting/server for your Drupal site
Choosing the right server for your drupal site can be a difficult process. What specifications do you need, what about connections/ftp/ssh host reliability and such like? With the plethora or hosting packages available on the internet, probably 10,000+ it can be tricky deciding on what may be best for your site. Here are a few pointers that I think about when choosing hosting/servers.
What is the expectations of your hosting provider?
My Top 5 Drupal Modules
Drupal as a massive extensible CMS has a plethora of useful and frankly fantastic modules. Her are the top ten as I am using them, obviously the drupal site has a list of the most used modules on Drupal, however, I thought I might just suggest my favorites too:
1. Views (it makes the whole database flexible which is obviously invaluable)
2. CCK (make data as you want it)
3. Mollom (brilliant spam detection and easy integration)
4. WYSIWIG (because sometimes it is so much easier)
5. Pathauto (brilliant SEO tool and makes my life easier)
Migration to Drupal
After presenting on 'Migration to Drupal' on Monday 12th April at DrupalCambs, had a few good chats about the nature of the drupal database and associated points.
Potentially, Migration to Drupal, I believe is fairly straighforward depending that you understand both the source and the target data well. Therefore in most cases you need to know your database and the Drupal MySql (or PostgreSql) database. However, for future reference it appears that when using content management systems, there is a belief that you don't need to understand how the data interacts providing that it does.
NOSql/MongoDB and Drupal: Implications
Recently I have been reading a lot more about NoSQL databases, specifically MongoDB and CouchDB, ad how 2010 will be the year of NoSql. NoSql databases themselves move away from the structure of a relational database, mssql/mysql, and move more toward storing all of their data in views, which can contain a range of information.
Why NoSql?
Migration of OsCommerce Users to Drupal Users
The migration of OsCommerce user to Drupal user can be a troublesome one, largely due to the password storage within OsCommerce. Ryan from Ubercart "the osCommerce method of storing passwords involves using "salt" on the password... appending some random characters and making an MD5 of it all. You can't undo MD5 hashes to get the original password, unfortunately, and Drupal just uses an MD5 of the password itself" (http://www.ubercart.org/forum/development/1379/oscommerce_ubercart).
Migration of OsCommerce Products to Node Products: 2
Following the uploading of products to one product database within phpmyadmin/mysql root, you will now have a Drupal database with a new table named 'products' within it. You can then use the table wizard module to expose the table to the migrate module and draw relationships between the 'products' and 'uc_products' database table.
I have added another little script which runs almost the same process as the migrate module, however, this may need to be edited to run successfully:
<?php
$ubercart_database = 'uberdrupal_tensor';
Migration of OsCommerce Products to Node Products
The difficult thing that appears with moving the products using the migrate moduel appears to be the inability to put multiple tables into one table. To counteract this I ended up migrating all ot the Oscommerce product data into one database table and then sending the content over with the migrate module. The code ended up something like this although this is obviously editable dependant on what data you have in Oscommerce/want in Drupal:
Product aggregator to take products from Oscommerce and dump into a mysql file for insertion to Drupal Database.
<?php
