First impressions of the exterior were: screen was smaller then I imagined, and it was a little heavier then I expected too. Also, annoyingly (although not a surprise), before you can start using it, you need a computer with itunes installed to activate the device before it lets you do anything else. When you’re all activated you can begin playing:

The screen, whilst its a lot smaller than a standard laptop screen, when you start reading and/or watching video/viewing photos, you find its a completely perfect size. The clarity, brightness, and great colours it produces is second to nothing I’ve seen before. The touch screen is also very responsive, and is extremely smooth with navigating and dragging things around the panels, menus, etc.

The device is light enough to hold in one hand and type with the other, or alternatively rest it on your lap and touch type in landscape mode without it burning a hole through your flesh (unlike a laptop). The other really neat thing is the battery life – you’ll get a good 10 hours doing high intensive tasks like video or 3G web browsing, or an hour or so longer if simply reading a document on ibooks.

After recovering from the initial awe, I tried installing a few apps, and then considered how this device would fit into my lifestyle of usually being around computers anyway. This is probably something I should have considered before purchasing the $928 device (3G 32GB model), but how was I to know?

I commute to/from work each day. The particular route is, suffice to say, a little dodgy at times, so  I’m probably not ready to casually use it in that environment just yet – perhaps in 6 months or a year, when other commuters are also using them, it might be ok..

So when else have I been using it: its pretty handy when you’re watching tv (sorta gives a new meaning to ‘couch surfing’). It has also been useful to check mail and things before bed, in the morning while eating breakfast, or for testing websites and things at work. I’m not sure yet, whether having the convenience during all of those activities was worth the nine hundred odd dollars though – maybe I’ll realise this as more native ipad apps are released.

Speaking of apps, below are a few I’ve been using lately:

• TweetDesk – great twitter client
• tvGuide – for checking whats on tv (yes, has all the Australian free to air channels)
• Weather HD - provides over the top animations and details of the weather forecasts in the configured areas.
• Wikipanion – easy to use interface for browsing wikipedia.org
• Quota – for checking your service usage totals and other statistics. i.e. mobile phone call totals, internet quota, 3g usage, google analytics stats, traffic camers and lots more.
• IMDb – easy to use interface for browseing imdb.com – great if your on the couch watching a new movie and you want to check what an actor/actress’s name is, and what other films they’ve been in.
• Habor Master – great fun but very addictive game about scheduling boats into a harbor.
• Good Reader – lets you read all your docs and pdfs via google apps and other services.

Unlike most apps on the itunes store, all the above, are purpose built for the IPad.

Ok, so a few downsides to the IPad:

• turning it off and on is a pain. If you use the pass code lock you have to enter it each time you want to turn it off. Obviously you can put the ipad to sleep without entering the pass code, but sleep uses battery that you don’t need it to waste.
• as you probably already know, websites or website components that use flash won’t display in Safari (or other browsers). Whilst I’m use to this sort of thing with the flashblocker addon in Firefox, it’s not something normal people (at least not until html5 is standardised, but that’s another discussion) would tolerate. Note: youtube has already html5-ised their website so that its compatible with IPad and other devices so don’t worry there, but youtube isn’t the only website using flash.
• the rich text editor in Wordpress’s admin area doesn’t work. I know there’s a wordpress app to cater for this, but it doesn’t actually have a rich text editor itself, so writing posts like this one takes a lot longer then normal (even for a web developer!).
• IPhone apps are designed to run on the IPhone, but the IPad lets you install them on the IPad anyway. This is where the ‘200,000 apps and counting’ marketing pitch comes from in the IPad ads. If you try installing an iphone app though, to put it lightly, sucks! It uses a small part of the screen, or theres an option to enlarge it, but then it looks incredibly pixelated. The truth is (as of writing) there’s upwards of about 5000 native IPad apps.

As you can see, there are plenty of good and bad things about the IPad. If you’re still sitting on the fence about whether to buy one or not, I recommend finding a friend who has one, and asking them to let you try it out, or if you don’t have any ipad friends, just go down to your local retailer and try out one of the devices they have on display.

I hope my notes above have provided an unbiased opinion, and will help you to make the right decision about whether to buy an IPad or not! Good luck.

The epub file format is an open e-book standard supported by a number of readers and tablet devices including Apple’s new iBooks store and the IPad. With the previous imminent release of the IPad in Australia, I recently had the task at work of creating an epub builder for the contents of a Drupal site.

The epub file format, is essentially a zip file renamed to an .epub. So the first thing you’ll want to do is download an epub file from somewhere, rename it to <whatever>.zip, extract it and review the different files and their content in your favorite text editor. The contents of most of these files, follow a number of standards set out by the International Digital Publishing Forum. You don’t have to know the in’s and outs of these standards, as they’re essentially just html and xml set out in a particular way. But if you use the example epub file you downloaded before, and reverse engineer things that way, you’ll get there eventually without spending weeks of study (arguably a bad thing, but who’s going to pay you to read 50 pages of a spec?).

There’s probably dozens of php libraries out there that will do zipping features for you, but the easiest way I found was just using PHP’s built in Zip Archive class. However, this class doesn’t support adding files to an archive that are uncompressed – which is required for the mimetype file of the epub file (as set out in the standard). Below is a small hack to get around this along with the basics of using the Zip Archive class.

$filename = "somefile.epub";
$mimetype = "model/mimetype"; // this file essentially contains "application/epub+zip" with no new line.

// note, the zip arguments tell zip to add this file to the archive as uncompressed. The epub standard requires the file be added at the start of the archive as uncompressed.
// you may need to do something different here if you're using a Windows server.
system("zip -q0Xj $filename $mimetype");

// For the rest of the epub file, lets use the easier ZipArchive php class.
$zip = new ZipArchive();

if ($zip->open($filename, ZIPARCHIVE::CREATE)!==TRUE) {
 // error out here
}

// Example of creating folders in the archive.
$zip->addEmptyDir("META-INF");

// Example of adding a file via the contents of another file
$contents = file_get_contents("model/article-template.html");
// perhaps do some preg replaces here to slap in your article contents from a database or other file.
$zip->addFromString("article_001.html", $contents);

// Example of adding a file to the archive directly from a file on the filesystem.
$zip->addFile("model/META-INF/container.xml", "META-INF/container.xml");

// .. lots more to do here, as per the epub standard.

When you’ve dynamically built your epub file in full, you’ll want to test it out on your PC or Mac. Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) will do just that and its free. If your having trouble opening your epub files in ADE, turn on the logging opens in your preferences, and review the contents of your ADE log file – discussed here.

You’ll also want to use the EPub validation tool to ensure the epub file is suitable for the other readers out there.

If you want to allow dynamic downloading of epub files, you can do this with the following headers in php:

header("Content-type: application/epub+zip");
header('Content-disposition:attachment;filename="somefilename.epub"');
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');
readfile($filename);

That’s about it really. A few quick links:

• International Digital Publishing Forum – contains full documentation on the epub standard
• Comparison of E-Book Formats – helpful when navigating around the e-book world and helped to see why epub was a great format to support.
• Adobe Digital Editions – a great tool for reviewing your epub files on PC or Mac.
• EPub validation tool – extremely helpful tool
• Epub Drupal module – supports exporting contents of the book module into epub – released very recently.

Hopefully these notes can help someone else out there on the interwebs.

In the last year or two, Ubuntu was my primary desktop OS, but every now and then when I wanted to use Photoshop, I had to boot into Windows. I also had various performance & compat issues in Ubuntu, like Flash, ZDE, PS3 Media Server, etc.

So I was considering a Mac. Why a Mac? Well most applications support Mac, but it also implements a hierarchical file system, bash shell, and all the neat cmd line app’s you would expect in a Unix based OS. The downsides (I thought), were that they were significantly more expensive than a PC. But after doing a little comparison with pricing on Dell against a similarly spec’ed Mac-Mini, they came off roughly the same.

Sidenote: The Mac Mini is designed for PC users considering the switch to Mac. All it comes with is the machine, power adapter and Mini DVI to DVI converter. So basically, you can utilize all your existing PC peripherals (monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers) to keep the conversion cost down.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, after ‘umming and arring’,  I took the jump, and picked up a Mac Mini on sale at JB Hifi.

Below are a few lessons I learnt (hopefully they’ll save someone else some time):

• The basics:
  • The Finder application is like your windows explorer for mac.
  • Your control panel is top right apple icon->System Preferences.
  • The menu at the bottom (dock) has some neat options for auto hide, auto magnify, so take a look at the settings via System preferences. If you want app’s to stay in the dock: when they’re running. right click the icon and select ‘keep in dock’.
  • There’s heaps of other different UI stuff compared with Windows, but you’ll probably just pick it up without much fuss – its all designed to be intuitive.
• When you download applications, they normally extract with a single .app file. An .app file is actually a special directory that contains binaries and other files that relate to the application. It’s a pretty neat way of keeping your file system neat and tidy though. However, you should be aware that sometimes the apps need to write files to your filesystem, in which case you will want to move them to your Applications folder, otherwise if you leave them on your desktop, or other places, they may not work properly.
• If you use a Microsoft keyboard,
  • during the keyboard setup step of your install, it may ask you about which key to use as the Command Key ‘‘ – simply use your Start Menu key.
  • after installation, if you use your home and end keys a lot, they don’t seem to work very well in some applications, this application can help with that.
• If you love open source, and want a repository of applications you can call on to be easily installed, try darwinports. Personally, I had issues getting it running as it needed XPort from apple.com, which wasn’t easy to find, so I just gave up and learnt the apple replacement apps, i.e. instead of “wget”, use “curl -O”
• (Australian specific) If you use iiNet as your ISP, the usage meter program from martybugs is for windows only – but a very good mac version exists here.
• If you use a program to periodically rotate your wallpaper images – don’t worry, because the Mac OSX software comes with this feature built into the OS.
• The built in mail application that comes with Mac OSX is really smart – you give it your email address (i.e. joeblogs@gmail.com) and it works out for you all the incoming and outgoing mail server details! All you end up setting is the password!
• I’ve only ever seen my firefox crash once, but when it did, you can’t kill it with an CTRL-ALT-DEL, but there are alternatives.
• Lots of games you may have played in the past actually run pretty well on the Mac Mini. I installed World of Warcraft for a test run, and with the auto detect settings, it run a solid +30FPS throughout.
• A good integrated development environment for PHP (and other languages too!) is: Eclipse
• To mount web folders via SSH, use Mac Fusion (which requires Mac Fuse too). To get it working in Snow Leopard, use this.
• A great light-weight editor to use (if you aren’t a vi/vim nutter) is Textmate. However it litters your folders with various meta files – to fix, follow these instructions.

That’s it for now – I’m sure there will be more soon!

Melbourne City
After hearing this from two different people (@johnlderry and the guys at the Melbourne Itomic office), Melbourne has a very rich culture. However to experience it, you’ve got to go out of the CBD area (which I failed to do on my last two visits). A few of the cultural villages we managed to hit were:

• Lygon St, Cartlon – heaps of Italian restaurants, with really decent food! We went to a place called Dimattinas and thoroughly enjoyed a gnocchi and lamb shanks. My only regret was trying to eat the whole meal – I was way too full afterwards!
• Bridge Rd, Richmond – outlet shopping without all the annoying crowds. There were a few dodgy places, but a few good places to shop here too. If you take a tram up Chapel St, and get off at Bridge Rd, you want to go West up Bridge Rd. Just walk up one side until you come to the main intersection and then walk back down the other side on the way back.
• Swan St, Richmond – some weird furniture precinct. We didn’t stop here, but took marvel from the tram windows. It’s basically heaps of smaller version Ikea shops, but ones that sell quality & unique stuff.
• Chapel St Precinct – the North end is mainly all expensive boutique clothing stores, but towards the middle/south end, it gets more affordable. The Prahran Markets down this end – this was the biggest fresh food market I’ve seen. We had a really good valued breakfast at one of the cafe’s there.
• There are heaps more though (Victoria St for Vietnamese, and so on..).  I hope to ‘do’ them next time I go to Melbourne.

Dandenong Ranges, Yarra Vally

Firstly here is an approximate plot of our journey:

This trip started getting interesting as we hit Monbulk road in the hills, and travelled through the windy roads of the Sherbrooke Forest Park. The vegetation here is apparently ’sub tropical rainforrest’ – its beautiful! And you get great views out to Melbourne. If views is what your after, you want to go to the ‘Sky High’ lookout near the town of Olinda, which is $5 entry per car, but definitely worth the trip. When we visited, there was bad weather, so we couldn’t see so well unfortunately.Up in the same area is the award winning Pie Resturant ‘Pie in the Sky‘ – be warned, there will be a queue for both the resturant and take away, but its well worth the wait!

We also took a quick dash to melbourne’s wine country, Yarra Glen. It was sort of like the Swan Valley that we have here in Perth, as it’s basically an hours drive out of the city, and then you get winery after winery. We only had time to visit one: Yerring Station, which had a really impressive wine tasting setup, store and cafe. Wish we could have seen a few more!

In Summary

This is only a fraction of what you can get up to in Melbourne, so I hope to return one day and do some more exploring and blogging. Enjoy!

When the defacing occurred, for whatever reason (thankfully) wordpress sent me an email to say the admin user email address has changed. This was about 30-40 minutes before I got into work, so as soon as got to work, I was able to disable the site quickly and add a temporary message.

Anyway, I thought I’d post what I did to recover the blog, without loosing any date. If your doing this yourself, please note that this will definitely not fix all defacements, this is just a log of what I did to get things working again. Also you’ll need your ftp username & password, and access to your mysql server (i.e. via phpmyadmin or direct mysql access):

1. The first thing to do, is disable the site whilst you perform the fixes. So rename your public_html folder to something else (so it can’t be accessed from the web to be re-defaced). In this example we’ll call it ‘public_html_stuffed’.
2. Next, take a look in your uploads folder (public_html_stuffed/wp-content/uploads/) to see if there’s anything that was recently added to the site and looks suspicious. I found something called l_php.jpg which was actually ended up being some very cryptic php code if you open it up in an editor.
3. Now take a look in your theme folder (public_html_stuffed/wp-content/themes/alexs-blog) to see if there’s anything there that has also recently changed. I found the index.php file here which had all the markup you would see when visiting the site. I just purged the whole folder to be on the safe side (we’ll fix this later).
4. Next you want to download a copy of the latest wordpress installation from wordpress.org, unzip the contents and overwrite all the files in your public_html_stuffed folder with the new wordpress. This is to firstly upgrade to a safe version, but also to purge any system files that may have been altered by the crackers.
5. Now for the database changes: goto the wp_users table and edit user 1 (the admin user). Make sure this users email address is your own, and if its been changed, set it back. Also set the password field to empty (don’t worry about this, it won’t let anyone log in with an empty password but we’ll fix it in a minute anyway).
6. While we’re in the database, we’ll want to remove any new posts that look like they relate to the defacement – in my case, there was one post that mentioned the odd filename (l_php.jpg) I found in the uploads folder. So I simply deleted that row.
7. We should be safe now to move the site back to being web accessible, so rename your public_html_stuffed back to public_html.
8. Access the site’s admin login page and click the recover password link. Follow the instructions for resetting the admin user’s password.
9. When in your admin, reset the theme, or download a new theme and set it to this (if you deleted it entirely). You’ll also want to make sure all your plugins are updated too! To be on the safe side I also re-ran the wordpress update via the update section of the admin area.
10. Clear your browser cache, and then you should be done.

In the process of doing the fix to my blog, I’ve also changed my theme – did anyone notice? probably not!

Just a FYI: the wordpress version I was using when this all happened was 2.8.5 – so it was only 4 versions (6 months) since I updated.

Administration Modules

• Menu Settings per Content Type
  When creating a node of any content types, the menu field will always be present. This module lets you enable/disable the menu field, as well as select which menu groups are selectable to a content type.
• Better Formats
  Greatly improves the ‘input filter’ features of textareas.
• TinyMCE Node Picker
  Adds a picker feature to TinyMCE for linking to internal pages.
• Link Checker
  Periodically checks content links to ensure they still work properly.
• Vertical Tabs
  Hides a lot of the really unnecessary system fields in node edit forms.

Front-end modules

• Menu Block
  Allows you to create local menu blocks showing child items of the current page.
• Site map
  Provides a page view of the pages of the site in a hierarchical list.

SEO modules

• Global Redirect
  When you have pathalias and pathauto on, the urls of your nodes look all pretty, but can still be accessed on the internal url, such as node/<node id>. If google finds you duplicating content on too many urls, they may water down the importance of the content. So what this module does is ensure the node views are only accessible on the pathalias url.
• Nodewords
  Whilst meta description and keywords are not so important now days, they still have a small place to play with the results pages for some search engines (like Yahoo). This module essentially allows you to set the meta description and keywords on a per node, per view basis.
• PageTitle
  Page Title simply allows you to set a custom title tag (used in head block of your markup) on a per node, per per view basis
• XML Sitemaps
  Automatically creates an xml sitemap to allow search engines to more intelligently index your site.

Other useful links

• Lullabot’s top 40 Modules
• Module usage statistics
• Acquia 3rd party Module list

Below is an approximate route of our journey through Europe:

London, UK

Massive, vibrant, old/new, clean/dirty, efficient, relatively affordable! We stayed with my very hospitable cousin in East London (which despite the bad reputation for the area) seemed really safe, and convenient, since it was only a 10 min bus and 10 min tube ride to city centre. Tips as follows:

• Learning to navigate the various tubes lines is a requirement! They’re fast and regular, and theres stops near just about everything. Get yourself an Oyster card and add credit as needed, as it makes getting on and off, really easy. You’ll also want a tube map as well as a normal street map and use the indexes in both to work out the best route. The Bus system in London is also just as reliable – most come every 5 or 10 minutes, and have priority in the traffic too.
• If your a museum/sites type, and want to really absorb stuff, give yourself at least half a day for all the majors. There’s heaps of museum’s, but of the ones we visited: National History Museum and Westminister Abbey – we could have spent agers there if we had the time.
• Make sure to check out the London Eye, but don’t bother with the more expensive fast queue tickets, as the normal queue is pretty fast anyway. Also don’t miss the 4D cinema experience which comes free with all Eye tickets – don’t be afraid, its actually pretty entertaining!
• Other cool things to check out are the markets Covert Gardens. On a weekend they have all these street busker’s that are actually really entertaining. The London Transport Museum is here too, which isn’t too bad if you were obsessed with the tubes like us! Also check out the Harrods department store, and go to a Westend show, like the Lion King – was freaking fantastic (even if your non-theater type like me!).

Munich, Germany

Modern, well maintained, boozey!, beautiful, friendly! Tips as follows:

• Don’t be too worried about the language barrier – most Germans speak English! That’s of course if you can find locals. When we went (during Oktoberfest), there were heaps of other Australians there, so it was a really friendly environment. To be on the safe side just learn the basics, Thankyou very much, Sorry, etc.
• Oktoberfest is such a crazy festival, I’d never expected it to be so huge and so happy. The beer at Oktoberfest is specially brewed to have a higher alcohol content, so take all the normal precautions, i.e. remember to eat a decent meal before you start drinking the beer. We filled up on beer pretty quickly and didn’t last very long at all (only 3 Steins, whilst most people were doing 6-8 a day).
• Oktoberfest goes for 2 weeks, but if you want a no fuss drinking session, attend the event during the weekdays (Mon-Thur) and start around 1PM. If you get there later in the day, or if you go instead on weekends, you apparently won’t get in, due to all the table bookings. We went on a Tuesday at 12PM, and no trouble getting in to the main english tent Hofbräu-Festzelt and later that evening into the Löwenbräu-Festhalle!
• If visiting Munich for Oktoberfest, also allocate some time to do a few non-boozy things – the city has a lot of history from WW2, and the like. Check out the first Nazi Concentration camp: Dachau, King Ludwig’s 18th century Castle: Neuschwanstein Castle, and Marienplatz in the city centre. There’s heaps of other great things to do there, like bike tours to the Gardens, etc, but we didn’t get a chance to do that, unfortunately.
• For decent priced & tasting food, check out Augustina Brewery – we went there for dinner just about every night! It was conveniently across the road from our hostel: Meininger, which is also conveniently close to Oktoberfest.

Ossoppo, Italy

A small, quiet country town in the north east of Italy, about 3 hours drive from Venice. We got here, via a Trenitalia train direct from Munich to Trento station, which wasn’t too bad going through the alps and then a car ride to Ossoppo. We stayed here with Katrina’s Aunty and had a really relaxing rest away from the bustling cities. The homes in the Italian Country are really different to Australia – they have all the homes packed up next to one another and then the gardens & paddocks are all together next to each other down the road. Speaking of roads, the driving there is really slack, no one really indicates, and people rarely keep left on multi lane roads. I may sound a bit negative, but I don’t mean to be, the place was so quiet and friendly – everyone in the town knew everyone, and its surrounded by the beautiful Alp mountain range.

Venice, Italy

Canels, culture and history! When you step off the train, its all just hustle and bustle with tourists and dodgy sales people swarming everywhere. Tips:

• It’s definitely one of those cities you’ve got to see – but give yourself at least a few nights here. We only stayed 2 nights due to our busy schedule, and only started to settle in and relax the night before we left.
• If you want to get around the various islands yourself, get the 24 or 48 hour water bus passes, and hop on and off whenever you please. Get them from the vendors at any water bus stop. They also have combo deals with a pass to get into a bunch of museums pre-paid, so ask them about that too, to save a few Euro.
• Avoid the famous sites of St Marco square anytime before 11AM, because from this time onwards, it’s basically impossible to walk around without getting a few squashed toes or a few bumps and bruises (yes!).
• As mentioned, theres heaps of tourists around and a lot of them are 50+. So if you’re looking for a break, check out the Caffe Rossa, Santa Margherita to the south west of the islands. It’s a little walk away from the main tousty area, but its where all the 20-30 year old’s hang out and drink copious quantities of Campari in the form of a cocktail called a Spritz. For 2.20 Euro you can’t go wrong!
• Getting to and from the Venice airport: the quickest and cheapest way is via a bus. It’s something like a 2 zone trip (3-4 Euro) and only takes 15 minutes, rather then using a water taxi, or other transport.

Paris, France

Culture shock!

• If you’re visiting Paris, do your very best to learn a bit of French. ‘Parley vou Ongley’ and ‘Merci Bookoo’ were really not enough, you need to learn a few more lines then that.
• Like London, the city underground train system is fantastic. Get yourself a Navi-go card and again (like the Oyster card in London) add credit as needed, or get all-day zone 3 or 5 features added to the card. Get the Metro map and a decent street map too.
• If you’ve read The Davinci code or seen the movie, check out the Louvre of course, its really massive! The museum has heaps of different sections, but the one you probably want is the Italian Art section where has all of Davinci’s works and the like. If you’re a little clueless on the art scene like myself, grab an audio commentary device (although a bit pricey) they really help to make you understand the stories that these ancient paintings tell. Allocate at a bare minimum at least half a day to this place, as there really is a lot to absorb.
• Paris is quite expensive, so be prepared for it: 4 Euro coffee’s, and 115 Euro per night rates for a small room in the city – its really over the top. To keep costs down find the super markets and buy your meals there most of the time and then just splurge a little at a nice restaurant at least once.
• Tower Eiffel is freakin massive – I would have never thought. Avoid visiting around 7PM, because this is when the lines start going really slowly, as they let pre-booked guests of the restaurant jump the queue! It’s also worth paying the little bit extra to get access to the top floor – just do it, its amazing!
• Palace Versailles is also worth a visit. It’s where Napoleon use you to hang out, and its also where the WW2 peace treaty was signed. The palace has some great art, and the massive gardens surrounding it which can be explored with golf buggy’s (although we didn’t have time for this). It’s definitely a full day trip.

Amsterdam, Holland

This place rocks, and was a nice change from Paris.

• All dutch people speak English, so there’s basically zero language barrier. After trying to learn 3 languages in about 2 weeks, we really didn’t have any time or patience to learn another (Dutch is also apparently a lot harder then most other European languages).
• Check out the coffee shops, but apparently go easy on the space cakes – they take at least 40 minutes to kick in. If you’re one of those types that wants to try everything, they don’t sell Magic mushrooms there anymore (due to a recent controversies involving tourists) but they do sell the truffles (roots/stalks) of the mushrooms which apparently have the same effect. All at your own risk of course!
• With all the dodgy stuff that happens there in terms of drugs and prostitution, we actually felt really safe here. You can walk around at 1AM in the morning, and have nothing to worry about, because theres always people out and about (mostly being entertained themselves).
• The Heineken Museum is worth a visit, with 3 free beers included and another 4D cinema experience (they call it “brewing you”). The Vodka museum is also interesting, and only costs around $7 Euro.
• If staying at a hotel, checkout the tourist brochures and pamphlets at the front desk – they usually have discounts written on them for museum entry and souvenir shop purchases.

Southhampton, UK

We took an overnight visit down to Southhampton and hired a small vechicle from Europ car and visited the Stonehenges. You may say, its just a bunch of rocks, why would you waste all the time and money? I’d probably say the same thing about Wave Rock here in Western Australia, but I dunno, I really liked visiting the Stonehenges – there’s something about 4000 year old rocks  that mysteriously came to rest from a place far far away. It was also a nice way to see the British country side. We stayed with Katrina’s Aunty in a small town out of Romney (near Southhampton) that not even the GPS could find – so don’t rely completely on these things – get a map too (any service station should have one)!. Another quick tip for hiring a car: with an Australian License, I had no trouble what so ever hiring the car in the UK, i.e. I didn’t need any sort of ‘international license’, so no fuss there.

General long haul Europe travel tips:

• Whenever landing in a new city, getting a decent map is critical! I’m not talking some free commercialized version, I mean paying 5-10 Euro to get one that actually has the street names on and comes with an Index. It saves a lot of hassle and headaches!
• The New Europe tours are really well worth it and the tour guides are extremely knowledgeable. We went on a total of 4 New Europe tours around Europe and of the 4 different tour guides, every single one of them were really friendly and had so many stories to share!
• When getting from one city to the next, investigate all forms of transport, be in plane, train, bus or ferry. In some cases, planes were cheaper, and other cases trains were. Kayak.com has a great system to search all the airlines for you. For trains, these differ for each country, and we found it best to book when you are actually at the origin – as the online systems seemed to always be more expensive (not sure if theres commissions there or something).
• Pack lite when you first leave, cause you’re going to bring a heap of crap back home for sure! Try save your present hunting until the last destination, but always pick up a few bits and pieces along the way, because you’ll never get a chance to get them again. The souvenirs you buy from dodgy looking street markets are often the cheapest, compared with proper shops or the airports.
• Have an open mind – and don’t show it if you get offended or upset! Your the tourist, so you should be offended but that’s what its all about, just don’t take it out on the locals.

Hopefully this tip list can help at least one budget traveller out there! Happy and Safe travels.

• For all 3rd party modules, first make sure a Drupal 6.x version exists! (if it doesn’t, see the next point).
• If you have any custom themes or modules you’ve developed, you’re going to need to re-write some parts of them. The quickest way to do this, is to install the coder module, which (when instructed) will scan your source code and tell you exactly what needs to be changed and directs you to the relevant section in the Drupal 6.x API changes doc. It’s a pretty sweet module and the documentation there rocks too!
• If the site you’re upgrading was at one stage version 4.x of Drupal, and you get an error in the initial run of update.php about “Unknown column ‘language’ in ‘where clause’” – this is normal, just manually correct the table, as per the following drupal.org thread: Upgrading from D5 -> D6 url_alias field errors prevent upgrade, manual bootstrap necessary.
• When you’ve finished re-writing your custom Drupal theme to be compatible with 6.x, make sure you Clear the Drupal internal cache, either from the menu option ‘Flush tables’ provided by the admin_menu module, or by truncating the contents of the cache_* tables.
• If you use the nice_menus module, and use a custom css file, you’ll need to reset the custom path location of the css file (set in Site Building->Themes->Configure->Global Settings).
• If you have some custom menu groups, by default they are set not to expand – if your themes were expecting them to show all the contents simply set them to expand via the Site Building->Menu’s section.

As you can see, it’s a lot easier upgrading from 5.x to 6.x then 4.x to 5.x!

So what’s next then? Drupal 7.0 of course! It’s due out in early 2010 and will feature major improvements in usability, automatic module updates, a fields api and much much more. The development version is due to be frozen in a week’s time, leaving a good 5-6 months of bug fixing (see webhick’s twitter profile – the honourably D7.0 co-maintainer). For more info about the 7.0 features, also checkout the D7UX.org website!

Functionality Issues:

• The option in the Site Configuration to “Disable One Page checkout” actually disables the checkout entirely (Disable One Page checkout).
• You have to install an extension to be able to edit email templates, without them being replaced when you upgrade the Magento Core (CLS Upgrade-proof Email Templates).
• I installed an upgrade to an extension (Securepay integration) via the Magento connector, and due to an sql issue, the whole site died with debug info on the homepage. I ended up having to restore my backup and then not upgrade to the bad version of the plugin.
• Page loads are really really slow although it appears to have been improved in the latest 1.3.2.3.

General Magento website issues:

• You can’t actually download the magento package directly (via another machine) from the link issued when visiting their website! They have some sort of cookie check – which means when you want to download the package to a server, you have to open up lynx and go through a bunch of pages rather then a simple wget command.
• The handbook for developers and designers on their website is really small and outdated. Most of the help online can only be found in their forums, which if your lucky enough, sometimes a Magento developer will actually reply with the ‘best practice’ way of solving something otherwise it’s hacks all the way.

Templating issues:

• The directory structure can be really really long, i.e. to edit the templates, you have to copy the existing themes, and then you’re editing files here: public_html\app\design\frontend\<theme name>\default\template\page\html\.
• If you want to make sense of what the contents of variables being echoed in template files you have to refer to the really ugly code located in another random place. @OliveChi notes Magento’s source code commenting hasn’t been properly written to support phpdoc, so you can say good bye to auto suggest/auto complete is ZDE.

On the plus side:

• The ‘Magento Connect’ feature of Magento allows anyone with the plugin key (obtained from their website) to download and install the plugin without any technical knowlege. There’s no downloading/uploading/untarring/running sql updates/update scripts – something you’d normally have to do for something like Drupal or Zencart.
• The sales & profit reports in the administration area provide all sorts of pretty charts.
• (this could also be a bad thing), but just about every facet of the magento ecommerce system can be configured via the Administration Area. i.e. you can have all sorts of product configurations/types.
• Multi-site/multi-store support.
• Out of box support for Paypal, and support for heaps of different payment gateways.

Feel free to comment if I’ve got something wrong!

The first thing to always do, is to make backups repeatedly throughout the upgrade process. I had the following commands handy and ran them right before I did anything serious:

tar -czvf site-backup-`date '+%y%m%d-%H%M%S'`.tar.gz public_html
mysqldump -u sitedb_primary -p sitedb_primary > \
`date '+%y%m%d-%H%M%S'`.sql

The other thing to do before you start,  is to do all your upgrading on a staging or development version of the site first. This is because, theres a high chance you won’t be able to do this whole process straight off the bat, and you probably don’t want to leave your site in maitenance mode over night while you recover for another attempt.

The following guides/screencasts are what I followed to perform a successful upgrade, plus a few notes, I made that weren’t covered:

1. Converting custom content types from Flexinode to CCK: http://docs.indymedia.be/node/1

• Make sure your flexinode fields all have unique names from one another. I had to rename a few of my flexinode body fields before flexiconvert would convert things successfully.
• Keep notes on all your original flexinode names and field names. This is so that when it comes to your themes you can easily update them to the new field names.
• When creating new content types, you must add the add/edit/delete privileges for each new content type before you can access this section.

2. Screencast for upgrading from D4.x to D5.x: http://drupal.org/videocasts/upgrading-to-5

• Disabling any custom theme or custom modules are some of the preparations recommended in the screencast. Before you do this though, make sure you don’t have any php code used for block visibility that might use functions in these custom themes or modules. You can either update them with a function_exists(), or re-write them to work out the condition another way.
• Before running update.php, it might help to do run the following commands on the database “DELETE FROM `variable` WHERE `name` = ‘cache_inc’; TRUNCATE TABLE `themonth_monthlydb`.`cache`;”. I read somewhere that the D4 caching options were different in D5, and if you tried accessing the site after the upgrade without doing this, it would cause your site to die.
• If your going to leave your site in maintenance mode for an hour whilst you conduct the upgrade, and don’t want the default Drupal Alien logo to show up, simply update the public_html/misc/maintenance.css body tag not to reference ‘druplicon.png’. This might be particularly important if you have a popular site and don’t want to scare people!
• For views, if you use the filter by ‘Distinct’, make sure its the first filter in your list, otherwise it doesn’t seem to let you save it.

3. For converting your custom themes and modules to D5: http://drupal.org/node/64279

• For a custom nice_menu’s css file, you can now specify the css filepath via Admin->Themes->Global Settings->Path to custom css file.
• Put all your custom modules in their own folder within public_html/sites/all/custom/
• Where possible try to keep your drupal install on the upgrade path by overriding things, or creating custom modules, rather then touching core or contributed php/theme code .
• When upgrading custom modules, if your in the process of doing things like updating modulename_settings – make sure you disable and then re-enable the module, otherwise, you’ll get some whacky side effects like double admin menu items, etc.

That’s it!

If you are doing an upgrade, I wish you all the luck and patience in the world! And for those that believe in doing a site rebuild over the upgrade, I recommend you try the upgrade first and exhaust all possibilities before giving up, because either re-entering all your sites content, or hacking up a content copy script is more work then it seems.