Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Drupal on Mac OS X

I'm working on enabling a CMS host for Mensa Bangalore with Guru. As a start, I am evaluating various CMS options like Drupal, DokuWiki, CMS Made Simple etc. Since Drupal seems to be a good option, I decided I will create a sandbox installation on my Mac G4. This post outlines the steps I followed to get Drupal up and running on OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Drupal 6.2 is the latest stable version available at the time of writing, so I downloaded the same. Since I intent to use this installation only for test & evaluation, I decided to go the easy way and use MAMP to create a local server environment with Apache, MySQL & PHP. Note that Mac OS X comes with Apache 1.3 and PHP 4.4 (both not enabled/started by default), however mySQL is present only in the server version.

I followed the HowTo in Drupal site on installing Drupal over MAMP. Installing MAMP was easy - as easy as downloading the dmg file and copying the MAMP folder to Applications folder, although the download was a bit hefty at 127 MB. Subsequently, I had to do a few steps to create a database in mySQL and install Drupal. The whole procedure was more or less painless. Now I get to play around with Drupal to see how I can make a decent web site for Mensa Bangalore with members areas and other features that we have identified.

I intent to identify the following to manage the web site:
users, roles, namespaces

However, from a initial evaluation, Drupal does not seem to support a "namespace" like concept that I want - for example, once I enable node view for members who are logged in, they can also view forums and polls. I need to identify a way to create distinct public & private areas.

[23 April] I found a nice article in Lullabot that talks about private forums in Drupal

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