Raw

I'm back home after a spell away so am having a lazy week, or rather picking odds and ends that have been on the to-do list seemingly forever. One thing was sorting out my sites, and coincidently the following notice appeared on the SWIG list last week:

After over 3 years of development by almost 1,000 contributors, Drupal 7 has finally been released today! Drupal is an open source content management platform powering hundreds of thousands of websites and applications. Notable websites are WhiteHouse.gov and the many top music artist's sites of Warner Media Group. Drupal 7 features the latest web technologies and remarkable improvements to user experience (UX). Drupal is the first major CMS to include RDF as part of its DNA and embed RDFa markup out of the box: all Drupal 7 sites annotate by default their pages, comments, images, tags, authors, posted date with the popular SIOC, FOAF, Dublin Core, and SKOS vocabularies. We hope that with Drupal adopting RDFa, we can pave the way for a greater adoption of the Semantic Web technologies. Drupal is estimated to power 1% of the Web, and even though Drupal 7 was just released, more than 30,000 websites are already powered by Drupal 7. With today's announcement, this number is likely to sky rocket in the coming months.
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This blog is still a little (Scala) homework project, but not long ago I registered a domain as a place to put my music noodling: spikeandwave.com. It was just a couple of handwritten HTML pages until yesterday, when I slapped Drupal there. Ok, so first my MySQL install seemed to be broken, so I took the opportunity to upgrade from Ubuntu Jaunty to Karmic. Turned out not only had I forgotten the admin password but the instructions I'd found online for resetting it didn't work. But these instructions did work. The install would have been a breeze, had I known this, in php.ini :

memory_limit = 32M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume

Default is 16MB and Drupal 7 core requires at least 32MB (I've set mine at 64MB to be on the safe side). You also need to restart Apache2 after changing this. If you make the mistake I did, then DROPing the DB and replacing the settings.php gets you back to square one.

So yesterday I wound up spending a couple of hours or so getting the thing installed. Today it took me maybe 3 hours to get a handle on how to use it enough to get the site more or less how I want it to look. While Drupal core seems to work fine out of the box, I did hit a few bugs with plugin modules, e.g. no joy with XML Sitemap. Must admit I didn't spend long on trying to get such things working, opting for the disable and leave for later workaround. Most of the time was spent getting to know the navigation and where to find things (e.g. took me ages to discover that links are under menus, d'oh!). The only bit of handcoding I did was to tweak the CSS so the centre column was wide enough for a big image.

So basically I reckon it's pretty much comparable to WordPress in terms of ease of setup/use. One nice feature which WordPress didn't have last time I looked is in-place updating of code, something that will hopefully help avoid the usual mess.

So finally to check those semweb credentials. There are hints of typed nodes here and there, but then what's is it's RDFa publishing like? The front page contains these 6 triples: drupal.txt (extracted with the RDFa distiller). content:encoded seems to have grown up!