The mission of WiseTome is to become a continuously expanding library of articles and information on growing number of topics.

The topics were initially around interests of my own, and after that - around interests of people who joined the wagon. Splat, the blog of WiseTome.com, was meant to be the place-holder for all the information that we came across. We did put some research in to it, but not enough to deem it to be fit in WiseTome.com. And Splat has served the purpose well to that extent. There are 150 short articles on the different categories posted at Splat over the course of roughly an year.

The other things we are involved in made it difficult for us to concentrate on compiling the information we had amassed and put it in a digestible format. This point of time, I will be concentrating on that. So expect to have less frequent or even absent posting at Splat.

Here are some of the changes applied to Splat and WiseTome.com. This process has involved tradeoffs between ideal setup and not breaking anything up.

• Common theme for WiseTome.com and Splat. Splat is after all a part of WiseTome and to this extent, the Garland theme is used for both. I might put in some customizations, but focus would be on the content. There would be nothing fancy, as the goal of WiseTome.com is to provide information.
• Common navigation at high level. The main navigation section is a horizontal strip of links that would let you navigate between sections of the site easily. No other URL structure has been changed and that means, none of you nice people who have tracked back to any articles here will be left broken links. All links work as they would earlier.

So - what should you expect for the near future of Splat and WiseTome.com?

• Less frequent and less regular posting at Splat. I would be working on compiling the mass of information that we have at Splat into WiseTome - so there would be no posts from me. There might be few guest posts peppered. This would be for at least a couple of months if my estimates hold true.
• Compiled articles at WiseTome. There would be work done at compiling all the works of information from myself and other authors. I am yet to figure out the best way to do it - so if you have any suggestions - you are most welcome.

I think I would be tackling one section at a time. Expect round ups of those works here.

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http://www.wisetome.com/?q=node/1

Since Drupal is a CMS that stores all the page and other content data in the database, it has to pass details to the main index.php of what page needs to be fetched. In effect, Drupal will be showing only one page, with dynamic data depending on the parameters passed. If a parameter has to be passed, it is done so by attaching a /?q=

http://www.wisetome.com/about-wisetome

We can use some configuration changes, a core module and a contributed module to achieve this.

Configuration changes

• After logging in to the Drupal site with your adminstrator login, go to Home > Administer > Site configuration > Clean URLs.
• Select enable.
• Save configuration.

Note - you may need to provide write permissions for the .htaccess file in your root folder of your webhost account.

This will change it to something that will eliminate the ?q= by using some URL rewrite rules.

http://www.wisetome.com/node/1

ULR aliases - Path module

You can use the core module, Path, to rename the path to whatever you want.

• Go to Home > Administer > Site building > Modules
• Enable the Path module

After you do this, when you edit a node (page, story, etc), or create a new one, below the content, you can specify custom URLs in the ‘URL Path Settings’. You can even manage all the URL aliases by going to Home > Administer > Site building > URL aliases.

Automatically generate URL aliases

There is another nifty third-party module that allows you to generate URL aliases on the fly (and also for the content that is already created). This is a must have, and I use it for every Drupal installation.

The contributed module can be downloaded and installed from Pathauto project page at Drupal.org. After you download the version that is compatible for your Drupal installation version, uncompress, and upload it to your ‘modules’ folder in your webhost, it will be visible in the Modules section.

• Go to Home > Administer > Site building > Modules
• Enable Pathauto (It will be in the ‘Other’ section in Drupal 5).
• Go to Home > Administer > Site configuration > Pathauto and you can configure it. It will also let you generate URL aliases for existing nodes.

Remeber to configure it every time you add a new type of node since it can be configured specifically for a type of node.

Once I had set this up, it automatically generated the URL for the about page of WiseTome.com:

http://www.wisetome.com/about-wisetome

Why go for pretty URLs?

Other than the stand point of how it is visible to search engines, it is user friendly. It makes more sense for users when they look at the URL regarding where they are with respect to the homepage.

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Batteries are one such product of technology and they serve several of our needs. And since we use the batteries, the responsibility falls on our shoulder to ensure that we protect the environment.

As we have seen earlier, batteries can be grouped as primary and secondary batteries. The use of secondary or rechargeable batteries would decrease the number of units we use, and arguably must reduce the effect it has on environment. But if they are not properly put to recycling process, they contain more toxic chemicals and heavy metals than primary batteries.

Batteries can be recycled - be it primary or rechargeable batteries. The Nickle in the NiCd battery can be reclaimed and reused. The problem though comes when we use the ‘use and throw’ kind of gadgets that have the battery sealed in them. This makes it difficult for recycling.

So how can you do your due in protecting the environment with regards to batteries?

• Reduce use of battery - When you need a new battery, double check that the battery is indeed fully discharged. Ensure that you do not have batteries with you before buying new ones. If possible, use converters and avoid use of batteries.
• Rechargeable batteries -Whenever possible, use rechargeable batteries. If you are going to see that they are recycled, this will go a long way in reducing the toxic material fall out into environment.
• Recycle - See that when you throw your waste, you put the used batteries in the recycling bin. Put effort at finding out if there are battery recycling collection outlets in your area, and dispose your batteries there.

Use of rechargeable battery is not the start and end of environment protection. But it does go a long way if the right path is chosen. Research in developing better rechargeable battery would mean that they can be economically used along with environmental friendly power generation options.

To illustrate the point, consider solar power generation. The problem with the option is that no power is generated during the night. But if augmented with an efficient rechargeable battery system, it could be used practically. The same would be the case with any other radical power generation systems.

Use the batteries wisely, and look out for the environment. We owe that to our future generations.

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Basically, there are two types of batteries. Primary batteries and rechargeable or secondary batteries.

Primary cell, by nature of its construction and compositions is able to generate electricity by converting its chemical energy. They are not rechargeable. Once all the energy is spent on providing electric energy, it cannot be used. It needs to be disposed and it needs to be replaced by another new one. But as a trade off they are very cost effective in manufacturing.

Secondary batteries on the other hand do not produce electricity by themselves. They need to be charged - that is - supplied by electricity which it storeos up with in itself and then discharges when in use. Once the full charge is drained, it can again be recharged. Such a discharge-recharge cycle can be performed several times before it can be disposed. For this reason, when other type of electricity is available cheap, you can use rechargeable batteries for quite some time before it can be replace. It is costlier to manufacture a secondary battery - but its ability to recharge pays for itself after several use when compared with primary battery.

The technology in secondary battery is improving. The scope of improvement in these battery is the cost of manufacture, the number of recharge cycles and the amount of time it takes to charge the battery. Research is done in order to improve on these factors.

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We will look at how they work internally. I will not be going into details of chemical reactions (like chemical formulas along with the emf values) - but this will be a general look at how they work.

A battery usually consists of one or more cells. If there are more than one cells, then they are usually connected in series.

The cells are usually galvanic cells. There are other types of cells like voltaic, electrolytic, fuel or flow cells. But for our understanding of the internal workings, we will consider them to be just cells.

The cells consist of two half cells. Each of these half cells consist of a electrode and an electrolyte. The half cells are connected to each other through a salt bridge or some kind of porous boundary - so that the electrolytes can interact with each other.

For the battery to function, the half cells would be of different types. The reason is that, if they are same, then they will be having the same emf (electromotive force) potential. The voltage of a battery (that actually powers other devices) is nothing but the difference between the emf of the two half cells. The electrode of the half cell having lower emf of the two, is called anode. It is usually denoted by the (-) sign. The other half cell having a higher potential is called cathode and is denoted by the (+) sign.

This emf of the half cell is a property of the combination chemicals of electrode and electrolyte. For example, a common half cell combination is Zinc (electrode) and Zinc Sulphate (electrolyte) has a emf of -0.76 V. Another combination of Copper (electrode) and Copper Sulphate (electrolyte) has emf of +0.34 V. A combination of these half cells would give us a galvanic cell having a voltage output of 1.1 V. A battery can have more than one cells in series to get a higher voltage output. The cells are said to be in series when the anode of one cell is connected to cathode of another.

When these batteries are used in devices, the anode and cathode is connected to the circuit of the device. The circuit completes the loop, and the chemical reactions take place with in the cells - basically exchanging electrons. The process continues as long as the circuit loop is not broken or the chemical energy exists. The battery gets discharged, when there is no more chemical energy to drive the electrons and create electricity.

Depending on the type of battery (primary or secondary) they can or cannot be recharged. But we will leave the different types of batteries for the next post.

Image is © of bennylin

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The batteries have a history that might just date back to 250 BC in case of Baghdad Battery though the purpose is shrouded in mystery. The modern phase in the life of battery technology, still has an alchemical nature, with Luigi Galvani experimenting with frogs and metals in 1780s. Serious work on the battery was done by Alessandro Volta in 1790s - he created the first ’stacked’ battery, by literally stacking voltaic cells. The technology has now brought batteries quite far ahead from those days, but we still seem to use some of the older varieties like the lead acid battery.

In this coming weeks, I will try to collect and compile some information on how these batteries work, what types of batteries are there, and other issues related to battery.

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The required core modules are - well - required. They cannot even be turned off - so we need not bother learning about them unless we are into custom module development. The other 23 modules are worth looking into, and they usually will supply most of the basic extended functionality you might need.

Help - This module can be turned off, but by default it is turned on and it handles the online help functionality for the various other features of your Drupal website.

Legacy - If you are starting fresh with a Drupal installation - ignore this. This module is provided for backward functionality.

Drupal - This is a module that registers to a central server. With this enabled, all the different Drupal powered websites in the internet, become a sort of ’super-website’ in terms of user base. It lets a user of one website log in to another Drupal powered website. This is generally disabled by default.

Locale - This allowed for using multiple localization UI files that would translate the UI to specific languages.

Contact - This provides the essential contact page. I believe every site must have this, and I enable it for every site I setup using Drupal.

Profile - This module is not so important for a single user website. But if community is involved, then you will want to store more information about your users. The Profile modules lets you define custom fields for the user.

Path - The module allows you to rename the URLs. By default, the URLs would be <yoursite.com>/?q=node/<number>. If you had switched on clean URLs, then it would be, <yoursite.com>/node/<number>. With the Path module, you can rename the URL for any node - <yoursite.com>/<anything-you-want>. (This module combined with the Pathauto module, become a versatile combo that I use for every Drupal powered site).

Comment - This module turns on the commenting system. It can have various setups of who can post comments, and where they end up in the moderation queue.

Poll - This allows you to create polls in your website.

Search - This module starts indexing all your content internally, and provides a versatile search option to search any type of content with in your site.

Ping - This pings other sites whenever new nodes (content) is created in your site.

Blog, Blog API - These two modules are a must have for a site that is setup to run multiple blogs by multiple users. The API module allows you to hook up offline applications to post to their blogs.

Aggregator - This allows you to show links or briefs from feeds (RSS or Atom)

Taxonomy - This module is the gem of Drupal. It requires a write up in itself, but for now, we will leave it by saying that it lets you organize all the content on your site any way you want.

Menu - This allows you to create multiple menus, that can have internal or external links.

Book - This modules allows you to setup hierarchical content like a book.

Forum - This allows you to create forums native to Drupal in your website. It uses a combination of the Forum type of content along with the Comment module to create forums. (Thus, Comment module must be turned on before you enable this module).

Color - This is a fancy module introduced in version 5. This allows for colors to be picked up for things like themes, from a neat color palette.

Statistics - The module collects different statistics like page views and referring sites and logs it.

Throttle - This is a life saver when you run huge sites. It allows you to control access to different parts of your website to specific groups of user, when the site is under load.

Tracker - This is useful in a community website. It allows for tracking of newly created content on the basis of a particular user.

Upload - This module allows users to upload and attach files to the content (node) they create.

Here we looked at the supplied modules of Drupal 5. They are quite sufficient for most of the needs, and configuring them allows for most of what is required. Other than these modules, there is a huge base of third party modules that can be used to further extend the functionality of the website.

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When a single person is working on software, the version control may not seem to be of much use at the cursory glance. But if the software is intended to do anything more than a singular task, it would be prudent to use a version control system - it makes it easier for software development. (Note that I would use the word ’software’ or ‘code’ but it would apply to any work). If a group of people are working on the same project, then version control system is certainly necessary.

There are many version control software out there - but you can apply the system just by following a certain set of processes. A version control system should do the following.

1. Maintain the revisions of a particular unit of code
2. Enable to go back to a particular revision
3. Enable branching and merging of code

The last one becomes important when a group of people work on a project.

A version control system lets you save the state of a code at all stages. Most systems employ the use of version numbers to maintain different states. This is sometimes visible to the user of the end product - the numbers like 1.0, 2.5, or multiple set of numbers get attached to the software.

Many times when you are working on a piece of code, and apply changes to it - there might be instances when things do not work as they should. That is the point, where the version control system becomes useful. You would be able to go back to the state of the code, just before you made those changes. You can either review that code to apply the change to the faulty version, or if not many versions were created after that version; you can start of from that point.

In cases of large projects, a group of people work on a software. Most of the times they would need to work on the same file or set of file. When such is the case, the particular person, takes out a branch from the main set of files, and works on it. The main version of code is usually called the ‘head’. Once the development to that branch is complete, it is merged back into the main set of files. If changes have been done to different part of the same code file by two people, the code is reviewed and merged appropriately.

As I mentioned earlier, there are many different software available (both open source and commercial) for giving you version control. In some cases, you can implement the system just by following some processes like file naming standards and change documentation. These are big words, but they are quite simple to follow.

File naming standards usually involve appending a group of numbers to the end of the file name. The different groups are separated by a dot (.), dash (-), or an under score (_). The first number is usually the main set of version, and you can use further set of numbers to show smaller changes.

filename_v1.0
filename_v1.1
filename_v1.2
filename_v1.2.1
filename_v1.3
filename_v2.0

Change documentations is nothing but keeping a note of what change was done in the particular version when compared to the earlier version. You can give a brief description of the change, and additionally, the line numbers or other specifics where the changes were made in the file. These details are put in a document.

I use version control, both at my job and for my personal projects. I even use it when I am working on art projects. One advantage of using it in art projects (especially vector art) is that I can usually reuse the work from one project in another similar project.

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In this article, I will be assuming a Drupal 5 installation. The Drupal 6 would be having what are called ‘install profiles’ that will actually ask few questions and setup these basic setups for you.

Site name, description, mission, copyright info

Once Drupal site is installed and the first user (the super-user) is created, login with it and proceed to ‘Home › Administer › Site configuration > Site Information’ and fill in the details like the site name, slogan, mission statement, and copyrithg info. I like to put this one before setting up anything else, because once these details are put, it lets me identify the Drupal instance easily by the website name instead of the default ‘Drupal’ title.

Status Report

This step lays down the crucial baseline and ensures that whatever you build and setup over it need not be rolled back. Go to ‘Home › Administer › Logs > Status Report’ and fix any errors that it might indicate. Usually, the ‘files’ folder is not created, and you would need to create it in the installation directory with proper read-write-execute permissions.

Basic theme selection and customization

Even if I am going to apply a custom theme to the website later, it helps to add direction to the website development by customizing the default themes. Go to ‘Home › Administer › Site building > Themes’ and play around with all the options. Choose a particular theme, and customize it. If you chose Garland theme, then you will be able to tweak the color sheme with the help of ‘Color’ module. You will also be able to switch off the logo or replace it with a custom one here.

URLs

This is a crucial first step in building a search engine friendly as well as user friendly website. At ‘Home › Administer › Site configuration > Clean URLs’, enable the Clean URLs option. You may need to give write access to the .htaccess file while doing this. At this point, you may have trouble with the cookies where it might show an ‘Access Denied’ message even if you are logged in. Just clear the browser cookies and cache and login again. Next, proceed to ‘Home › Administer › Site building > Modules’ and activate the ‘Path’ module if it is not already activated. You are now prepared to install the custom module - Pathauto.

User Management

Depending on how many users would be actually using the site, you might want to consider creating member groups for the different users. You will be able to do this at ‘Home › Administer › User management > Roles’. By default, there will be two roles: anonymous user and authenticated user. If it is a single user website (in case you want to setup a blog website), then you need not perform anything. Else create new roles. You can proceed to ‘Home › Administer › User management > Access Control’ and fine tune the different permissions for different types of roles.

Taxonomy

This feature, which happens to be the strenght of Drupal, is often looked to be quite complex by the first time users. (By users, I mean who use Drupal as a CMS to setup a webstite - not those who visit and use the website). In the begining, for sake of understanding, assume it to be just categories. With Taxonomy, you can define the different categories, the different types of content can be put into. By default, you are able to create two types of content (or node as it is called in Drupal) - story and page. Page is used for static-type content like about pages, and FAQ pages. Story type nodes are basically for articles. You can define different sets of categories of these types of nodes, or make a common set of categories. A set of categories is called vocabulary. I like to create a basic vocabulary before even I start to create content, and add few terms (categories) in them. You can do this at ‘Home › Administer › Content management > Categories’. If this option is not visible, you may need to activate the ‘Taxonomy’ module at ‘Home › Administer › Site building > Modules’.

Stub content and menu

I create some stub pages for About and similar pages ( ‘Home › Create content > Page’ ), and then add them to the primary links (or menu). To edit the primary links menu, go to ‘Home › Administer › Site building > Menu’ and add links to the Primary Links Menu.

The above steps are what I do for almost all the Drupal setups I work on. From this point on, it depends on what kind of website you want to create. Most of it can be achieved by using the core modules that come out of the box - they just need to be activated and setup. We will look at the different core modules in depth in the next post.

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Before I go into a bit of details on how you can install Drupal, let us look at what phases a software undergoes before being actually used by the users.

In simple terms, software needs to be developed, tested and then deployed into production. This is generally how it happens in full blown software development scenarios. Do we need all of this for setting up Drupal?  In my opinion, you need at least two instances of your website. One that is actually visible and sits in a public URL. Another one where you can develop and test the website.

Hosting costs have come down these days, but yet it might not seem prudent to go setting up your test instance on a server. You can setup a local instance quite easily for Drupal.  For setting up a local instance, I usually use the XAMPP package that gives me the full stack of webserver (Apache), MySQL and PHP.  (You can get XAMPP from the Apache Friends website).

The installation is quite simple in the present version of Drupal 5. (It is said that it would be more simpler with the Drupal 6 release).  I will be explaining how it is done for MySQL as the database.

1. Download Drupal. At this point in time, I would advice for using Drupal 5.2 as Drupal 6 would be coming out soon.
2. Unzip and put the contents of the folder in your root location. In case of a webhost, it would be in the ‘public_html’ or similar root folder provided for your account. In case of a local instance, and if you have gone for XAMPP, it would be \xampp\htdocs folder.
3. Go to phpMyAdmin and create a database - give a proper database name so that it is easily decipherable. Create a database user and give all permissions to that user on that database.
4. Open your browser and give the URL that should point you to the root where you unzipped the contents of Drupal download file.  In case of a webhost, it will usually be the domain name you parked there.  In case of local instance, it will be http://localhost/ or http://localhost/<install folder> depending on how you unzipped the files into htdocs.
5. This should automatically fire up the install.php - and it is a pretty easy from here on as it is a guided install. Give the database name, database user name, the password, and you should be good to go.

Always have a process in place where you can develop and test your site separately and move the files and database to ‘production’ or live environment. And before making any new changes to your website, take full backups.  It is much easier to restore your website from backups if the changes you put in go wrong. Of course, this is not a problem during installation.

Please use the comment section if you have any doubts or if you need more details.

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