Internet WorkShop

There seems to be a lot of excitement in the Drupal 7 dev groups about support for SQLite. Well and good, but when I try to install Drupal 7 on my Mysql/Apache/PHP5 server, I get “Your PHP configuration only supports the SQLite database type so it has been automatically selected.”. And unfortunately the section search capabilities on drupal.org are not good enough to make a quick existing bug search efficient.

Drupal 6 detects my Mysql server without any problem…

(I was trying to install Drupal 7 for the RDF capabilities, it seems RDFCCK will be part of core in 7. But looks like may have to wait a few months.)

A bit of research determined that Drupal 7 requires the PDO extension to PHP. However, something funky in my Fedora OS setup didn’t let me recompile PHP from scratch, and yum update php wasn’t doing the trick. Finally, after looking at this page

http://www.electrictoolbox.com/update-php-command-line-yum/

I tried just yum installing the extensions, like so:

1010 yum install php-pdo
1011 yum install php-mysql
1012 yum update php
1013 yum install php-gd
1014 yum install php-xml
1015 yum install php-soap

and that worked. Your mileage may vary…

Some links relevent to vocab reuse/microformats. In particular RDF vocabs should be simple to import into all the modern CMS’s, but we’re not there yet.

esw.w3.org/VocabularyMarket

esw.w3.org/SeedApplications

Evoc drupal module for importing RDF vocabs and exposing properties in Drupal
RDFCCK drupal module by the same author, Stephane “scor” Corlosquet
article by Marco Neumann on importing semantics into Drupal

Import SKOS into Drupal taxonomy but then do you need to use the RDFa module to have your Drupal content part of the linked data initiative?
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Follow-up (If I post as a comment, not visible from front page – need to configure WP to do follow-up threads better):

Reading Scor’s paper, sounds like work is heading in the right direction. The autocompletion sounds promising

“To this end, our module adds a new tab “Manage RDF mappings” to the content
type administration panel of CCK for managing such mappings cf. Fig. 2. An autocomplete list of suggested terms is shown, based on the keyword entered by the user.

The terms are coming from two different sources, which are detailed below.

External vocabulary importer service

The module RDF external vocabulary importer…”

I like the looks of this – need to see if we can also have cubes that interface with mysql, make fuzzy-rule-based decisions as well as clear inferences. If so, this looks like a fun way to code…

Just ran into an error, using mysqlimport to pull in a tab-delimited file with long float values in BIGINT columns. When trying to import the value

866.897575000000057458

as an int, mysqlimport turned it into 866897575000000057458 – a bit off!

mysqlimport Ver 3.5 Distrib 5.0.45, for redhat-linux-gnu (x86_64)
(maybe this is fixed in 5.1, don’t know)

Posted some thoughts on my personal blog at

http://goldavelez.com/blog/2009/10/30/the-ultimate-organizer-will-it-be-a-web-app/

about the ideal organizer (smart, quick, easy, fast, private, snappy…). As someone much smarter said a long time ago, using your computer should feel like playing the violin – assuming, that is, that you know how to play the violin. But it should come to feel natural, like an extension of the body and mind. For humans, this means millisecond level feedback.

WordPress is not a bad CMS.  Fairly simple, well documented, has the requisite features like version control, trackback, authentication, and a nice set of user contributed themes and plugins.  Its pretty damn good.

But.  The basic CMS assumption that ‘the content originates here’ is flawed.  In today’s world, sometimes there may be another authoritative source of the content I wish to aggregate on my blog.  Even if I wrote it, for some reason I may have wanted to write it first on blogspot, or facebook, or linkedin, or some other site – but still have it appear on my central blog site.  What would be even better would be the ability to edit it on my primary site and have the edits propagate back to the other locations, if permitted.

WordPress, Drupal, other leading CMS’s do have the ability to pull in feeds and insert content from other sources, but they manage those feeds differently from ‘normal’ posts, as if they were an afterthought or add-on.

I’d like to see a CMS that has a single central content management system, which has additional fields for each bit of content:

- original/authoritative source
- rules/actions for edits
- rules/actions for updates from external sources

This would make it easier to manage content from multiple sources and in one place manage the rules for propagating that content.  An API should be exposed to request updates to the content, which other similar CMS’s could tap into.

While I’m at it, this ideal CMS would store a copy of all content in flat text files.  This would make searching faster and easier (not having to spider and then extract the essential content) and would allow use of all the existing text file tools!  (Like, Perl scripts   The name and path of the text file would indicate which bit of content it corresponds to, and the rules could be set to allow direct text file edits, or not.  Direct edits could be propagated back into the system.  This would make it much easier to bulk edit large amounts of content, not for theming, but for content accuracy, as is sometimes necessary.

Perhaps this could all be accomplished with some sort of WordPress-CodeIgniter hybrid?  Would be a shame to start something from scratch and lose all the cool themes people have made.  Well – will have to wait til another day.