[drupal-support] help

Mon May 23 08:30:16 UTC 2005

Hello,

I think I am going to just start over and import a fresh 4.6 copy.  Looks
like I'll just work through until tomorrow night.

Thank you Carlos for the info.. I should be able to manage that now that I
know where to find the option.

Thank you Kobus for actually logging in and taking a look at the site.  What
a group!  This is what I call a global community.

Gerhard, This is a completely new install.  Just done strangely because of
my limited knowledge of PHP and SQL.  I am learning quickly.

In regards to the accessibility issue,

Drupal is very good.

The only area which is difficult to understand is layout and visual design
concepts.  But, I guess that is to be expected to some extent considering I
can't see the screen. lol

CMS truly helped me a great deal.

The President of our organization is also blind.
He asked me to help him develop this community portal.  He wanted it to do
many things but the problem was we are starting with very limited funding.

So, I decided to figure out how to do it ourselves.
The answer was this CMS package.
What I am struggling with, working by myself and with no staff around, is
what it looks like.

More detailed descriptions of themes and templates
would help tremendously.

Also, if anybody could give me suggestions once I have the text and
navigation situated, it would be greatly appreciated.

Our goal is to launch a community newspaper and blog which truly utilizes
the multi media capabilities of the web.
We wish to set it up so that local communities can be developed through out
the world on our platform.
We want to bring people together in a global community by focusing on the
local neighborhood.
We will offer news, education, business, real estate, and community
development services

Anyhow, I got off the point.
I want you to know I picked Drupal precisely because it is accessible and
helps me with a very solid foundation to build from as apposed to me trying
to design and layout a web site in Front Page or anything like that.  But...
alas... a foundation isn't a completed structure.

It seems there are two very critical components tied into a successful
website.
The irony is they are two very different sets of skills required in the same
person.

There is the developer and technician, a job somebody who is blind can
easily accomplish.
And there is the graphic design and presentation.
This area is very challenging for somebody who is blind with existing tools.

CMS programs take it a few steps in the right direction.  Maybe four or five
steps.
In fact, it is a selling point.  Blind people should use CMS because it
helps them design and layout websites which will be considered professional
and presentable by sighted people.

So far,
I figure I can use menus to navigate.  Insert pages for primary text, use
blocks for advertising our services.
And, I will have a much better design than if I had to lay it out myself.
See what I mean.

What may make it better is to offer detailed descriptions of what the themes
and templates look like.
You can provide practical ideas of how pages can be laid out with the blocks
and menus.

By the way,
These are the errors I found in the log.

Table 'bnmcmain_bnmc.dr_flood' doesn't exist query: DELETE FROM

Unknown column 'a.aid' in 'field list' query: SELECT a.aid, a.ti

But, I guess it is irrelevant.
I'll let you know if I have any  other trouble after I start from scratch.

Kind Regards,
Chris

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gerhard Killesreiter" <killesreiter at physik.uni-freiburg.de>
To: <drupal-support at drupal.org>
Sent: Monday, May 23, 2005 3:12 AM
Subject: Re: [drupal-support] help

>
>
> On Mon, 23 May 2005, Christopher Taylor wrote:
>
> > 1. I had a question about a funny message that is shoing up on the front
page.
> > No matter what we do, it won't go away.
> > It just says
> > "?q=node
> > N/A"
>
> That's strange. Can we look at your site?
>
> > 2. I did a rather round about install procedure because I am not
> > familiar with sql and since I am blind, my screen reader doesn't
> > work all that great in certain places.
>
> Could you point out the places where it doesn't work? We are trying to
> make Drupal and drupal.org as accesible as possible.
>
> > My host provider has a script of 4.5.1 which they offer on the
> > platform.  They didn't have 4.6 so I downloaded it and unpacked it
> > in a new directory.  I did all the appropriate updates to the
> > config.php file.
> > I did an install of 4.5.1.
>
> Hmm, are you trying to install 4.6 over a previously existing 4.5.1
> install?
>
> > Then, I ran update.php from 10-31-2004, the default.  It gave the
> > severity error and so I ran the update again using the date of
> > 01-07-2005. It seemed to solve the problem with the exception of one
> > message about an "invalid argument call"
>
> Can you put your database backup (you did make a backup, did you?) back
> in place, run the update from 10-31-2004 and tell me which error you
> got?
>
> > Then I logged in and it gave me an error because I tried to create
> > the first account.
>
> If you did upgrade a 4.5.1 installation you would have already had that
> account. If you on the other hand did a fresh 4.6.1 install you'd not
> need to run the update script. What did you do?
>
> > Apparently, it already had admin in there as the first record.
> > Anyhow, it all cleared away and things were working fine until this
> > strange node message.  This occurred when I tried submitting a test
> > story. I change the name in the system from my name to another ain
> > the "Author name" and it gave some error about the user not
> > exsisting when I hit "submit".  Somehow, it took the submit but the
> > story disappeared.  That is when the node error came up.  It showed
> > the story in the log but there was no trace of the content.
>
> It is difficult to say what happened. Drupal should not accept your
> change if a user with the given name does not exist.
>
> > 3. I tried to run a cron.php thinking it would fix something but it
> > gave an error about a header a missing on line 66.
>
> line 66 of which file? It is possible that you have an error in your
> settings.php file.
>
> > I guess the questions are
> > 1. Do I have a possible unstable install?  How can I tell?
> > 2. What is this strange ?q=node
> > n/a that popped up after the problem with the story submit?  How do I
make it go away?
>
> > 3. Why am I getting an error on line 66 when I run cron.php?
> >
> > I am about to invest a lot of time in design and I still don't know
> > exactly how to back up the database.
>
> *ouch* You haven't made an update before making a database backup have
> you? Does your hosting provider provide some wort of user panel such as
> cpanel, plesk or similar? Those usually contain rather simple ways of
> doing backups. If you have access to the the command line you can try:
>
> mysqldump -u"your user name" -p"your password" "your drupal database" >
backup.sql
>
> > I have a lot of work to put in all the design and menus, etc.
>
> I hope you didn't start yet. Your database might be screwed.
>
> Cheers,
> Gerhard
>
> -- 
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