Showing posts with label Acquia Drupal Installer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Acquia Drupal Installer. Show all posts

Saturday 20 October 2012

new start

Big business can pay for people to be polite to the executives by over-chargingAfter a day trying to change the Drupal version XXXfecking!x core, I decided that maybe someone else will work-out how to do this more simply in future as has been very well done for modules. I am still happy each time I download a module in a lazy way, knowing what a chore it was to move files about and read or amend text files next to them a year or two ago; so much depends on things that vary between individual users, like whether I had put my altered & site-specific files in a folder called "sites" away from the default files, and whether I have read the text tile called readme.txt which tells me to rename the default.settings.txt file to "settings.txt" and change a line in it. All fine if you're used to it and good at it but otherwise a bit like trying to fly before there were seats on cheap airlines; the choice is pay or make your own plane and ask strangers online for advice while they can't see what you are building. And if you're selling honest goods made in a democratic welfare state, there isn't the margin to pay, as McDonalds still do, to get a good version of Commerce Kickstart going.

Following the Youtube video by Tom Geller that I transcribed before, I'm using Aquia Drupal's stack installer. Can I just adapt the Aquia Drupal that comes with it from scratch? There is a nag message that says I should disable and delete all their chosen extra modules before it goes, and then says that some of the modules cannot be disabled. I ask the sales chat thingey: "How do I uninstall the Aquia modules? (I want to keep things simple for now and maybe use Aquia help later, so I want to start with core drupal and nothing else)"
Answer: "just go to drupal.org and download Drupal 7 core". So I am back to following the Youtube video by Tom Geller that I transcribed before.


Saturday 10 December 2011

Just in case somebody asks, these are the three ways to install Drupal and reasons they don't work for me. I'm writing this in case I need to brief someone to help.
  1. A one-click install from the control panel of a server.

    (a) Doesn't install the Kickstart version of Drupal Commerce Shopping Cart. This is a bit like a comfort blanket - I think I've learned to do without it - but as the program doesn't work without a lot of tweaking unless you have this installation profile, I'd like to be able to start from the Kickstart version every time I need to.

    (b) Puts too much strain on the server if I need to install extra modules. The program is a bit too big to do this on a middling sized server. So I would have to download it onto my hard disc somehow, do the updates and fixes, and them upload it to the server again. This is in fact what I want to do but starting on the hard disc. It comes to the same thing; I still need to back-up everything to my hard disc, tinker there, and upload again.
  2. Unpack Drupal on my hard disc, follow rather intricate instructions for file transfer to the server, and turning-on a the database to recognise all these files.

    With luck when I upload I get a welcome screen asking questions like "is your database called localhost?" and the thing installs itself. It's a bit of a black art the first few times but I think I've got the hang.

    Unfortunately Drupal 6 could almost work like this but Drupal 7 is just too big, and if I stick to older releases I will be missing-out on a lot of shopping cart modules. When I try to install, the server just says it's out of memory and the helpdesk says this can't be changed.
  3. Unpack a server onto my hard disc - a set of all the programs a server needs - and press the "import" button to import a version of Drupal, which could be Drupal Commerce Kickstart for the first stage of a shopping cart.

    This is the only system that could work and sometimes it does. I have managed once to install Drupal Commerce Kickstart onto a server program called Aquia Drupal Desktop, and from there managed a slightly laborious way of importing the data from its database to the one on my proper server that the world can see.

    Unfortunately my installation doesn't work. It finds error messages in every other thing it does. I guess this is because I should have updated or uploaded a load of files that go with Drupal's database onto the server, and I just deleted them thinking that the ones already there might do. Now I can't repeat the actions which worked in the past for this step three.
Even if I could get the thing installed there would be a bit of work laying-out the site using various layout themes or writing one, and I might be quite accident-prone at that.

A confusion is that installation can work one day and not the next. Why?

If I could re-install a Drupal Commerce Kickstart on the Aquia Drupal installer, make sure I don't delete any related files, and then FTP those files up to the server at the same time I move the database content, that would be an excercise completed. I would know if a mismatch of database and surrounding files is making my test site wonky.

According to Drupal 7 Essential Training - Getting a Drupal site up fast the Kickstarter or Drupal files simply uncompress. I find that they don't and any software like 7zip or Pea Zip or windows XP's own unpacker reports a problem or asks for a password just in case that's the trouble. This stage must have worked for me at least once in the past so why now now?

Update 12/12: the same file dowloads, and when I click on it it opens to reveal a folder called Drupal, which is quite different to a couple of days ago. Clicking on this unzips it with Windows XP's built-in unzipper. Unzipping is strangely slow but it works. Meanwhile the old download file won't unzip and won't delete. I googled the error message and found that some people log-on as administrator to delete such stuff, others like me downlowd a program called Unlocker, which worked. You have to steer past several adverts on Softpedia trying to look like your dowload button so that you download other programs as well, but I managed to skip them this time.

Just as in Tom Geller video on Youtube, I can import the Drupal directory into my Aquia Drupal desktop. I deleted my old one and imported the new, giving it the same file name as the one on my server. And this time I didn't delete all the files in the folder after importing to the desktopy thing.


If anyone is interested in Ubercart video tutorials which are meant to be a quick way to get an ecommerce site online, this is a list of some available:

Transcribed videos: -
[Drupal 7 / Ubercart video tutorial 7 of 10 showed how to use the default catalog module]
[Drupal 7 / Ubercart video tutorial 8 of 10 showed an alternative flexible method of showing a catalog]
[Drupal 7 / Ubercart video tutorial 9 of 10 shows how to use product kits, stock, and order states]
[Drupal 7 / Ubercart video tutorial 10 of 10 shows a simple checkout, reports, and suggests a theme]

Saturday 26 November 2011

Acquia Drupal installer: does it ever work?


.

So why mention the first two if there is a perfect answer? I suspect a trap. There are three pages on these lines according to links at the bottom of https://drupal.org/node/263. Which traps worst?

I've had this problem before but didn't write it down. Use the installer that the free Lynda.com video says is easiest:
http://www.acquia.com/downloads
Click on "Dev Desktop" and "RUN", agreeing to everything but their XMail server
Get
Folder .... not found ... please select an existing folder; do so
Get  
Error reading file C:/Program Files/acquia-drupal/AcqiaDevDesktopControlPanel/Static.ini
I've had this before and forgotten the cause. Google it:
Your search - C:/Program Files/acquia-drupal/AcqiaDevDesktopControlPanel/Static.ini - did not match any documents. 

Try saving the file before running it.
Get
Error reading file C:/Program Files/acquia-drupal/AcqiaDevDesktopControlPanel/Static.ini
Try googling Aquia Drupal install Windows XP and find that there is a forum on it with 400 posts, many of them unanswered. Obscure references to trying to tidy-up your registry after a messy uninstall of this program in order to trick it into thinking it is starting again for the fist time when you have another try. Is this worth persuiing? No.
[afterthought: try Revo uninstaller to do a thorough removal of anything related to previous installs. Double click the blue drip icon of the downloaded installer again. Same problem.]

https://drupal.org/node/749846
https://drupal.org/node/161975


How to go about this a different way?
Last time I googled for different installers and found LAMP looked likely.
What's puzzling is that some people - including writers of textbooks and help videos - have no problem at all and do not see how there could be one. Others post over 400 times on a help forum without result.

https://drupal.org/documentation/install/windows
...suggests LAMP as an installer for windowsXP, and one of the people in the apache friends who wrote it wears a dog collar which makes this look like my kind of program.

Windows-Specific Guidelines - Install Drupal On Home Computer (Local). (https://drupal.org/node/263)
...suggests two server installers that already have Drupal on them










  • BitNami Drupal Stack




  • Camel shrinks wheelbarrow







  • SpikeWAMP



  • If you are bewildered by all these options, just want some nice easy instructions to follow, go and have a look at Simple install of Drupal on XAMPP. Trying out Drupal on your Windows machine couldn't be easier.
    https://drupal.org/node/749846
    https://drupal.org/node/161975
    My strategy is to attempt the simplest most standard and basic package holiday install of Ubercart on Drupal 7, hack-around the problems of posting to three different postage zones, and see what happens. So I should try BitNami Drupal Stack and then SpikeWAMP, whatever they are. Do you picture them as camels or is it just me? Something about the spikey names.

    Bitnami
    is a spiky name. The thing installed with one option about whether I wanted Drupal. Yes. There was a brief error message with no explanation at all saying that port80 was being used. Everyone at Bitnami knows the numbers of ports and their significance and assumes that Bitnami users do too. I typed in "81", thinking that ports seemed to go in numerical order.

    "https://John:81 Windows cannot find http://john:81 . Make sure that you have typed the name correctly, and then try again. To search for a file, click the start button and then click search"

    Well balls to Bitnami. Now time to try SikeWamp. Which was a free open source project of a company now taken over by black duck I find from the link. Finding the installer will he harder than persuading a camel to darn my socks with a needle, although to be fair camels are dumb and lack fingers.





    Bitnami: will you forget I said anything rude?

    SpikeWAMP proves impossible to track down.

    Also, I have discovered likely looking files to start in your directory, which look related to the Drupal Bitnami I downloaded and installed. Click some likely files and a screen appears with "Access Bitnami Drupal Stack as the first option on the page. Click on that and something like a Drupal site hosted on my hard disc appears.

    I have tried to turn off as many things on my control+alt+delete list as I can in case one of them was using the same port, or birth, or bus or whatever it is. Something worked. I have also googled Port80 and discovered that typing netstat -o 1 into the run box of the start menu is meant to tell me what software uses what port. It doesn't tell me anything I understand, but there's satisfaction to be had in getting that far - particularly the final 1 which repeats the process each second instead of dissapearing after one second.