Drupal Support – IRC Channels

With all open source software there tends to be a community of developers whose passion is to keep the project alive. With Drupal this community can be accessed in a variety of ways. One of the best ways that I have encountered is that of the IRC support channels. The benefit of using the IRC channels is that support for issues encountered during the installation and configuration stages of the site, but it gives an opportunity to become part of the community of users who use Drupal on a daily basis.

There are many support channels that can be joined, although there are some vital ones that would be most beneficial as most of the community sit within and actively participate in these channels. These channels include:

• #drupal – General talk about the Drupal community, patches that need reviewing, themes that need altering and modules that need creating. This also serves as a good place to talk about future releases of Drupal.
• #drupal-contribute – This channel is for those wishing to get further involved into the community. Tasks discussed in this channel include documentation, module and theme development, promotion of Drupal and the overall Drupal.org infrastructure.
• #drupal-support – This channel is for support questions. If an issue arises during the configuration of a site, this is the place to ask it. You will usually get a solution to your issue as soon as someone is available.

It is incredibly easy to join one of these channels. Software such as Pidgin or Miranda have this functionality built in. Further information about the Drupal support channels and a list of channels that are currently used visit the following link – www.drupal.org/irc.

There is also a very small but dedicated Drupal community located within New Zealand. To join this channel enter #drupal-nz as the channel name, and it will automatically redirect you to the channel.  The community within New Zealand is currently very small with around 300+ developers, but will continue to grow as Drupal becomes more popular as a content management system.

Drupal as a blogging platform

With Drupal being highly configurable and scalable, setting up a blog and posting to that blog is very easy to do. By default, the blog module is included and distributed with the latest release of Drupal core. To take advantage of this functionality, all a user needs to do is to download the latest version of core and install it on a web server.

Once Drupal has been installed, a user would need to go to Administer / Modules and then select the blog module and click Save. The page will reload and display the message “Saved Changes” and this means that the module has been installed and is ready to go.

In order to create a blog post in Drupal, follow the following steps

1. Click on Administer / Content

2. Select Create Content

3. Select Blog Entry

4. Enter the title and text that you want to be included within your post.

5. Alter the path settings (customer URL – this is optional).

6. Click Save. Your blog post will now be displayed on the site.

Drupal offers the same blogging functionality as other software available (e.g. WordPress, Blogspot) including most recent posting blocks, categories, tagging and comments. The difference is that with Drupal, every user on your site has the ability to make a blog post which in turn means that there is the functionality available to have multiple blogs contained within the one site.

In conclusion, in deciding on which platform to use, I would definitely recommend looking at the overall requirements of the site and the technical ability of its users. If the site is to have multiple blogs and other functionality, then Drupal is the way to go. If the system is to only have one blog at most then blogging software such as WordPress and Blogspot is fine for this.

 

Drupal – www.drupal.org

I was first introduced to Drupal when researching a platform that would allow end users to be able to log in to a site and update a content without the need for a web developer. Drupal is an open source content management system which was written in PHP with a MySQL backend. It is highly scalable and can be easily customized to fit any solution.

There are a number of websites that currently have Drupal implemented as the framework. Such sites include:

• The New Zealand Veterinary Association – http://www.vetspace.org.nz
• The Beehive – http://www.beehive.govt.nz
• The Labour Party
• The Green Party
• The Act Party – http://www.act.org.nz

Drupal is a very good solution for any type of organization whether it be a non profit, for profit, community groups and small and large businesses. Usage for Drupal is on the increase in New Zealand, with a small but dedicated group of developers but as more web developers are exposed to this technology, this community will continue to grow.

PDF Split and Merge (PDFsam)

I was first introduced to PDFsam when I was given the task of splitting about 300 conference proceedings into individual session talks, totaling around about 5500 individual sessions. The splitting of the document needed to be exact, as the sessions were being uploaded individually into a different site. I worked out that I could split an individual PDF, with around about 10 minutes, give or take, depending on how much content was in each session. I figured there must have been an easier and quicker way to split the documents into individual arguments.

Without spending very much or no money at all for a solution, I decided to turn to Google to find a solution. “open source PDF splitter” came to mind and this was the first set of keywords that I had entered that day. The first result that came up was that of “PDF split and merge”. I clicked on the link, had a read over the site, then downloaded and printed off the instruction manual.

The slogan of  “A free and open source tool to split and merge PDF documents” meant that I had found my solution. I downloaded the Windows version and installed it onto my machine. On first run, it looked as though it could only split one document in multiple places. I worked out that this would shave roughly another 2 or 3 minutes off the processing time for each proceeding.

In the documentation I had downloaded for the software, there was a mention of a command line interface. This meant that I could create a text file with a command that would then split the proceeding into individual articles. THe command that I used was:

java -jar pdfsam-console-0.7.3.jar -f C:\file1.pdf -f C:\file1.pdf -o C:\output.pdf -u 1-1:2-8: concat

Explanation of the above command:

• java – jar pdfsam-console-0.7.3.jar – the version of PDFsam that I was using at the time. Java is one of the requirements needed for PDFsam to run.
• -f – the prefix used in the command line to indicate the input file (i.e. the file that was needing to be split)
• -o – the prefix used in the command line to indicate the output file (i.e. the split file or finished product)
• 1-1 – the range of pages needed to be taken from the first document (in this case it was the title page of the proceeding)
• 2-8 – the range of pages that the session or talk spanned within the proceeding document
• concat – the command used within the command line to combine the two individual pdf’s together (in my case, this was the command that I used to combine the title page with the pages that related to the session of the conference).

Using this command for each session in each proceeding, meant that I could split one proceeding in around about 15 seconds (depending on the amount of talks within each conference). This meant overall that the daunting process of splitting 300 conference proceedings was sped up, and the documents could be implemented into the new system in a timely manner.

About PDFsam:

• PDFsam is freely available for download from Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfsam/) or from the PDFsam website (www.pdfsam.org)
• It requires Java to run
• Versions available for Windows and MacOS.
• Source code is freely available
• Support forum and wiki available on the website as well as the documentation

To conclude, I would definitely recommend using PDFsam to split and merge a wide variety of PDF documents. It is very easy to configure and use and sped up my processing time dramatically.

 

Ponderings and Welcome

Well here goes – I have been tasked to create a blog for the first assignment of 157.240 – Computer-mediated Communications and Online communities at Massey University.

So I have spent the last week wondering what I should write about, what route I should take, and what should I discuss. With working in the Information Technology industry for the last five years, and working for some non-profit organizations during that time, I had come across and have used a large variety of open source software and technologies.

Then it hit me, I should write about my experiences with the open source software that I have come across and used, as well as my experiences encountered while using these technologies.  So thats it, I have found my topic. Sit back, relax and have a read of my experiences with open source software – you never know, you may find something that can be implemented into an organization to save costs and reduce complexity.