Real Application Alternatives

I read an article this morning indicating that Microsoft is taking the threat posed by OpenOffice seriously. I see this as wise on their part...for a company that has a history of being late to take some things seriously, most notably, this new fangled internet thing, which back in the 90's it they staggered and wimpered to make any serious effort with their web browser, which I suspect is only surviving today because it's part of the Windows OS. Later on they mocked and poked fun at Linux, which now has a huge foothold in the server market and small device and appliance markets.

Many of these "app killer" apps still have serious limitations that prevent any real traction. Thunderbird is a great email client, but has long lacked some of the features that Outlook has like appointment calendars, for example. Gimp is a very cool graphics application, and very powerful and completely free. It does, however, suffer from usability issues that conflict with it's peers like Photoshop, which is frustrating, and doesn't fully support importing Photoshop files, though pretty good, it does miss some random effects and other things when importing at times.

OpenOffice on the other hand, seems to be a very legitimate alternative to MS Office users. I use OpenOffice and have very few issues when working with clients that have standard office docs (without the "x" on the extension), and any I have had have been cured by sharing as open document format files. They looks and work pretty darn close to Office (pre Office 2007) so flipping between the two is easier as well.

It seems to me one of the more difficult aspects getting big business away from MS Office is the fact so many of them pay a huge licensing fee every year for access to a huge product line. SO switching to OpenOffice would save them little or nothing in these large license packages and add to that the complexity of yet another application to support for IT staff and training.

In the case of OpenOffice, they are not taking over, not because lack of features or usability, but, more because of simplicity and Microsoft large hold on business via bulk licensing fees.

If you are a small business or at home office, try OpenOffice, it's a very real alternative to MS Office, and free!

Migrating Drupal Installs

I am sure it comes as little surprise from the direction of my posts lately that I have been up to my nose in Drupal management and development. With that I have found some tweaks and quirks of the system I am trying to document, partly for my own good later on for reference, and partly for anyone else that has the problem and may find this blog.

Most recently I have developed a Drupal based site for a client on my multisite install, and, after development, had to move it to another server.

This presents issues of file and folder permissions and ownership, and most any shared hosting has no ability to run a CHOWN (change owner) functions on files or folders, though most allow CHMOD (change mode).

When Drupal is installed, the user sets the domain folder to a 0777 CHMOD and, during install, it creates a few subfolders for file uploads, theme settings and images and any other user storage needs. When it creates these folders it is owned by "apache" (or whatever the web server is) and CHMOD of 0775, which allows the server to read and right to and from those folders with no problems. However, when the web site is moved to a new server, if you download the existing site, and upload it all to a new server, all folders are owned by the user and typically has default permissions of 0755, and files of 0644.

To work around this, typically setting all those same files and folders to 0777 and leaving the ownership as user owned is a valid and workable tactic. But there are some cases where it does not. I recently learned that in one case, the module xmlSiteMap, the site map is not retrievable with those permissions.

Should you encounter such errors with xmlSiteMap, or any other file creating module or the core of Drupal, what I have found the quickest and easiest way to get around the problems is simply to delete the directory altogether, and go back to the module or theme and rebuild it by rerunning the configuration of said module or theme. Doing so will rebuild the necessary directories and files with proper permissions on each.

More on NodeWords in Drupal

I have been working with Nodewords quite frequently of late in an effort to get some real SEO in the Drupal environment. Without the Nodewords module, this is virtually impossible.

As discussed in an earlier blog, Nodewords is a single source for customizing meta descriptions on a page-by-page basis, as well as site verification for Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools. Combine this with the xmlsitemap module and you have the ground work for a good SEO system.

In doing these projects, I have stumbled across a couple reasonably common errors I'd like to make people aware of...one is the subject of Drupal caching and the other a simple issue and how to avoid.

First the simple issue...one must be careful to not ignore the front page tags of a Drupal web site. If you have a page, and "promote it to the front page" via the content management tools, the meta description, keywords, or any other Nodewords content, does not get promoted with it. The front page has specific tags for just it. These include the site verification tags, as well as it's own description, keywords, robots, return visits and whatever else your choose to use.

This is, undoubtedly, due to the fact any number of content sections may be on the front page at any given time, so to avoid the meta for each of those pieces of content, the front page has it's own tags that must be defined within the global meta tags section of the Nodewords content management tools.

The second is the subject of caching. I have had more than one site that I have enabled Nodewords in, only to go to the control panel and see now meta tag options in the lists and other vacant data. After a bit of research and trial and error, I have now found that in every case, clearing Drupal's cache has fixed it.

Drupal caches some of the content in order to increase performance, sometimes it gets in the way. In order to fix this issue, click "administer > site configuration > performance" and scroll to the bottom. There you will see a button labelled "Clear cached data". Click it, and let it do it's thing. That should clear up the issue.

Open Flash Chart Free Charting Application

For a recent project we (myself and the other developer on this team) have been told we need to build a graphical charting engine. I had used a few Flash based charting tools before, but the other developer found a new one I hadn't seen before; Open Flash Chart. This made yesterday afternoon a rather enjoyable, productive, and amusing time.

Before getting into the amusing piece, I have to say, this is one of the finest Flash based charting applications I have ever used, very functional, looks good and feature packed. It turns out it is the tool we are going to use.

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, I have to say it's also one of the wackiest projects I have worked on.

Weirdities:

• When we first got to the site, and read enough to know we wanted to try it, we went to the download it and found the subversions were names, not numbers, and the link to actually download was way at the bottom of a page explaining each subversion, and in some cases, the explanation behind the wacky name. As a consultant that needs to get a job done, I couldn't care less.

• So, I get the download, unpack it and find out all the sample/demo files were broken. Paths to supporting JSON files were wrong, heck, even the path to the .swf was wrong, so, I give up on that and just go through their tutorial, follow some steps and get everything together.
  
  
• For some pieces of the chart, a parameter of "color" is available, in other pieces, "colour" is available, and they are not forgiving to allow either in any place...which shows one of the downside of open source if not properly managed.
  
  
• Tool tips are unpredictable and some of the variables work in some charts and not others, tool tip customization on the whole works in some and not others or each chart type has their own quirks in getting them to work properly. It's not consistent.
  
  
• Lack of some very basic features when some very weird, outlandish ones are available.

Cool Stuff:

• We start looking through the different reporting styles available, which is impressive; bars, lines, radar, animations, tool tips that are customizable, 2d and 3d layouts, semi-transparencies, multiple reports on a single chart, but in addition some of the wackiest animations and strangest features that I don't understand.
  
  
• Pretty easy to use if you ignore the demo files and just use the tutorials on the web site.
  
  
• A single .swf for all the chart types, others I have used had a .swf for bar charts, one for pipe charts, one for pie charts, etc.
  
  
• The PHP dynamic JSON generating from database sources is very cool, and actually, better documented than using JavaScript directly, which is weird...but cool.
  
  
• FREE! Well, not exactly, they ask you to post a picture of yourself holding a beer in their forum for the usage agreement. (eh?)

From reading documentation, seeing their forum, and their product, it's clear the developers have fun doing what they do, and have a "wacky" sense of humor, but in the end made a product that does 95% of what we need, and does it simply. Data is fed to the charts with standard JSON arrays, which is nice and charts are customizable in color and other appearance features, but the non-functional demo's was annoying as was the silly versioning convention.

Still, in the end, great product.