Insights from Other Drupal Maintainers

Since I do have limited knowledge of the Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP -- LAMP combination. I've been reaching out more to some of the Drupal developers that I've met at SXSW Interactive, Activist Technology gathering, Personal Democracy Forum and CivicSpace User's Summit.

Brady Jarvis (aka grohk) runs a site called code0range.net. I came across his site because he catalyzed the development of the node moderation Drupal module, which I'm interested in helping him expand for my site and other media-related sites that need some sort of self-moderation mechanism.

I asked Jarvis a number of Drupal questions, and about a cool aspect of his site.

Jarvis has pictures of the user associated with each blog post -- this makes scanning through a community blog much easier task for the readers.

I asked him how he set this up, and he told me:

user pictures are a standard Drupal feature, look under administer >> user >> configure and look for pictures. You will also need to enable user pictures in your theme settings, probably under admin >> themes >> settings, unless you have a phptemplate theme...then you need to goto that theme specifically.

Now on my To Do list.
UPDATE: I turned on the pictures, and they now appear on the right hand side next to each post. It looks like I need to tweak the theme settings in order to get the to look like this:

In response to my laundry list of Drupal issues, Jarvis tells me:

blogroll has its edit control right on the block itself on a per user basis.

also, you need to setup a cron job to run the maintenance script http://www.echochamberproject.com/cron.php -- this is essential for Drupal to function properly. Ask you host to help you setup a cron job for this. Run it every six hours.

Your host systems clock should be set to UTC in order for the site wide time to be correct, if it is not, then ignore the -0400 and pick the correct *time* instead. Actually, from reading you post, I think you need to pick -0800.

I'm going to try Jarvis' suggestions with each of these issues, and keep this blog post updated. I found that it really helped me keep track of pending problems and potential solutions by posting all of my everything in one blog post and going through and updating the post whenever I found the solution.

I'm sure that other inexperienced LAMP Drupal web admins will appreciate this process, even if it this site comes up when doing a Google search on a module error that only happens because you haven't installed something basic -- like the PHP GD Toolkit -- Image handling capability.