Drupal Servers

One of the things you have to learn if you are going to be a true Drupal Ninja is to setup your own LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP/Perl) stack for your web server. Even if you aren't running Drupal, knowing how to setup and manage your LAMP stack is essential to web development. Basically, each operating system has a little bit different setup to it's Apache MySQL and PHP server setup. This particular tutorial is to help setup a LAMP server stack on your Debian 5 (Lenny) or Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) or less. It seems that the distribution packages available for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) contain PHP 5.3, which many web software have not been upgraded to work with yet. Because of this, I do not recommend running Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) if you plan on running Drupal on your server. Drupal doesn't play nicely with PHP 5.3.

I have been trying to find a GPL theme to contribute to the Drupal CVS repository, as that is a requirement, but that is harder than it sounds. I have searched far and wide, and it has come to my attention that probably the best place to find GPL themes is on Wordpress.org. All of their contributed themes are licensed the same as Drupal.org, so any of the themes available there can be made into a Drupal theme and contributed. I took my first stab at this with a theme called Wedding Bells.

After attending Drupalcon San Franciso 2010 this year and sitting though some of the great Drupalcon sessions I experienced, I have gotten really excited about contributing back great things that I can do with Drupal  to the Drupal community. Recently, I have been able to do some things in the realm of custom module development for clients, but nothing for the community yet. One of these reasons is that I have yet to gain my CVS account.

I really want to help contribute some great things to the Drupal community, but there are some restrictions to what can be added to the Drupal CVS repository, and I have found this out very recently. Because of this, I have decided to contribute top Creative Commons Drupal themes on my own website until I am able to create a great GPL v2+ Drupal theme that meets Drupal.org's CVS requirements.  Check out the 2 brand new Creative Commons Drupal 6 themes I have created after the jump.

So, I have gotten to the point where just having a section on my old personal website just isn't going to cut it for my Drupal Development and other web development skills and projects. I have decided to make this my full-time job, so I have made a new website specifically for web development. I will be focusing on Drupal development and Drupal consulting, along with custom theme development and even some Search Engine Optimization if needed. So without further delay, I am introducing my new Drupal company, Arbor Web Development.

A few months ago I was told about a great offer that ChunkHost was having for testing their new Virtual Server hosting. They are currently still having this great offer to Beta test their new Chunk hosting service. A chunk is very similar to a slice which Slicehost offers, where they offer a virtual server within a larger cloud server environment. I have not used Slicehost personally, but several of my colleagues have, and they were quite satisfied with that service.

As it turns out, I have also been checking out the Tattler App, another great website application built using Drupal. This tool looks somewhat like a Digg clone of some sort, but actually does some really different things behind the scenes. If you have a specific topic or niche you are looking to follow, but not really sure where to look, Tattler is the tool for you.

I have been testing out the Managing News flavor of Drupal for a while, and yesterday decided to add a new Drupal news subdomain to Drupalservers.net and power it with Managing News. You can now get even more Drupal news beyond just what we currently feature on this site in the Drupal news section. I have already added 20+ feeds that have important roles in the community, or are great sources of Drupal information.

I haven't had as much time as I would like to update the site with great content, but I was able to setup a news feed from Drupal Planet and have made a Drupal news page. It should update to the minute as I have setup a cron job to make sure the feed updates automatically. So long to the poormanscron module that I have been using for so long, and hello cron jobs.

It has been a long time coming, but I finally was able to get the site updated to Drupal 6. Just in time for Drupal 7 alpha that was just released. Drupal 6 is still probably recommended at this point, so I will stick with it for a while.

We decided to add some new sections to our site as we add some helpful new content for webmasters out there looking to improve their current Drupal website, and especially those just getting started. One of the constant cries from the community is that there is not enough documentation in layman's terms.