Drupal

If you reserve part of your site for authenticated users, members, or even more selected groups, and even if you don't, you'll soon find out about a problem with RSS feeds: feeds that are available only when the user is logged in, will obviously not be available when she's not. Nevertheless, she will set her feed reader to access the feed...

Drupal requires http://example.com/cron.php being called regularly. You can set this up in Plesk within each site. Plesk will create a corresponding entry in /var/spool/cron/tabs/site_user. The downside of this is that each cron run will produce an entry in the /var/log/messages system log. If you have a couple of sites and each one runs the cron job every hour, then you'll easily end up with hundreds of useless system log entries every day!

Everyone and especially the search engines prefer clean URLs, such as you can see on this site. When you originally install Drupal, it uses URLs with a question mark. In the administrative section there's a test for checking whether your web server can support clean URLs. If it can't, here's what to do:

Open /etc/sysconfig/apache2 in your editor, look for the line starting with APACHE_MODULES=, and add rewrite to the list of Apache modules that your web server loads.

Do you hate redundancy? So do I! Rather than installing and maintaining Drupal and its modules separately for each virtual host, it's much better to install it once and link each domain to the shared copy. Of course, we still want to maintain high security. This blog entry will walk you through installing Drupal 5.1 on a SuSE 10.0 box.

Let's get right to it:

groupadd drupal
groupmod drupal -A wwwrun
groupmod drupal -A psaftp
groupmod drupal -A psaadm

Create a temporary directory for file uploads:

The User Login block is not a pretty sight. If you'd like to set up a website where part of the audience is anonymous users, then the User Login block is not welcome on each and every page. This is one of the first things I wanted to customize on my Drupal site, and it's easy:

Install the loginmenu module, enable it in admin/modules, and disable the User Login block in admin/block.

If you need a way to control who can see your content, then you should tackle this early on. Generally, in Drupal 4.7, modules cannot deny access to certain nodes, but they must hide all nodes and then grant access selectively. If you already have content, installing such a module will make all of your content vanish!

I'm trying to find my way here, reporting as I go...

By default, Drupal allows only the following tags in the HTML filter:
<a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>

That's not enough for writing any reasonably formatted content, and I prefer the shorter <b> over the clumsy <strong>, even though the latter may be preferable in some contexts.