WordPress to Drupal: First Lesson

Why is it that a problem always waits to manifest itself until there is something else to blame?

Here I am trying to figure out how to get the most recent forum topics to show up on the Drupal front page. I find this really neat Drupal package called views, download and install it, go to activate it and I get a blank screen. Now if this were a production quality module, I'd be looking at the system logs right away. But the views module is still considered beta for Drupal 6.

My first thought is that the new module doesn't "like" something about my system (I've been hacking away on my development system). I uninstall it and then reinstall it several times with slightly different approaches each time. Always the same result: blank browser screen. I dig through the on-line documentation which points out the need to install "advanced help" to get the full documentation for the views module which I duly do.

Another blank screen. The difference, this time, is advanced help is a production quality module. This time I check the Apache error log. This time I see the out of memory error messages. ARRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

So, I bumped the PHP memory size from 16MB (default) to 64MB. Now both advanced help and Drupal views modules install with no problem. The site sort of looks like I want now since views lets me customize content displayed including letting me have a Drupal block that consists of the most recent forum topics which I plan to use article blogs. The views module even includes a sample view of the most recent forum comments which was the other content I wanted on the front page. Woo Hoo!

Oh, and I started on the "Access Control" chapter in the book I'm using so I'll, hopefully, be exposing the Drupal site soon.

Cheers,
Dave