Sparrowtail

OK - pretty weird problem today. My local dev Drupal site was acting a bit strange. Most page requests worked fine, but some (e.g. /logout) brought back a completely blank page. "View source" on the page showed that the source was completely blank too. No errors in the apache error log, and nothing in the Drupal watchdog table.

Until the end of last week, this blog was hosted on my free web space from my ISP, Freedom2Surf. Now, while these guys have been great as an ISP (good value, uptime and performance, free regrades to higher bandwidth, turning a blind eye to occassional overstepping of my monthly bandwidth allowance!), their free web space is pretty basic. There's PHP and MySQL, and all was fine until I wanted a proper domain name for the site. Having bought a domain name, it seemed there were two options for making that domain name take users to my site:

So, the next thing to build in my site is an RSS parser. I'm uploading video files to a hosting provider, who generates their own unique ID for each video. However, when users browse my site they want to play these videos, which means that I need to know the hosting provider's ID for the video the user wants to watch. My video host provides an RSS feed of my uploaded content, which includes their IDs. So I need a scheduled task which will poll this feed and parse it so the IDs can be written back to my database.

Drupal has a very powerful module called Tokens, which makes various pieces of data available in other modules. As an example, the Pathauto module will create friendly URLs for any piece of content based on some feature of that content, using token substitution. By default, a new piece of content will be available at the URL http://www.mysite.com/node/5 (assuming you have enabled clean URLs).

I've now got a bunch of structured data in a relational database, and need to get it into Drupal. I've created my content types using CCK. Fortunately, there's a great overview here which highlights some of the core Drupal tables I need to populate which aren't immediately apparent. Everything is pretty straightforward, apart from populating deltas for repeating fields in CCK.

I'm starting to get the hang of Drupal now, largely thanks to Robert Safuto's video tutorials (especially the one about CCK and Views) - nice one Robert!

A few weeks ago, I decided that the best foundation for the site I'm working on would be Drupal. After some discussions around the scale of the site and the likely complexity of our customisations, this seemed to be the natural choice. One of the key factors in this decision was the perceived strength of Drupal's architecture.

My previous lives have left me pretty handy with C#. I only really used .net 1.1 for serious heavy lifting, so I'm finding all kinds of nice suprises (like generics - strongly typed ArrayLists at last!) in .net 3.5 now that I've started using Visual Studio 2008 (and finding that the free Express Edition is fine for commercial development came as a rather nice suprise too!).

Let the sprints begin!

So, day one dawns. I've left the heady world of corporate software development, and begun the startup adventure! In this blog I'll be writing about the whole process of getting a new site developed and launched. I'll be looking in some depth at all kinds of different tools to do what we need, and writing a fair bit about managing the software development process too.