Technology Tales

WordPress database error: [Can’t create table … (errno: 121)]

When I was trying to upgrade one of my test blogs to WordPress 2.3 RC1, I got error messages like the above littering the screen during the installation. The PHP functions mysql_noerr (or mysqli_noerr) and mysql_error (or mysqli_error) seem to have been busily at work. These messages told me that the upgrade hadn't worked, so I went off googling as usual and perusing the MySQL tomes in my possession. Not for the first time, the web yielded nothing but dross and, in the end, I tried deleting the relevant database and starting from scratch again. That resolved the problem.

The reason for database deletion sorting things out is that MySQL got confused when there was a mismatch between what was in the file system and what its InnoDB table was saying. Now, I think that the cause of this was that I naively copied in tables using Windows Explorer. Deleting the database cleared the air and all was well once I allowed WordPress to do the needful in its time-honoured way. With another lesson learned for the future, I wish that frustration wasn't part of the learning experience too...

Twelve months of WordPress

It was on this date several months ago that I moved my hillwalking blog into the world of WordPress. It's a self-hosted WordPress instance and has been for all that time. Because of the move, I was taken into the world of MySQL, one that intrudes still to this day. Most of the time for the migration was spent setting up a theme to fit in with the rest of the website, of which it forms an essential part. The matter of importing all the old posts took up time too, especially when it came to fixing glitches with the XML import. Still, it was all done within a weekend, and my website hasn't looked back since. More people now have a reason to visit, and the blog may even have surpassed the photo gallery as the site's main attraction. I kept up the old blog for a while but have dispensed with that by now; I was keeping both blogs synchronised and that became a tiring manoeuvre. Another upshot of the whole experience is that I have become more aware of the UK outdoor scene and learnt a thing or two too. It might even have encouraged me to go from day tripping to multi-day backpacking, a real-world change that is well removed from the world of technology.

Another side to hardening WordPress

A little while back, I took to using the wonders of .htaccess directives to make my WordPress deployments more secure. It does work but has the disadvantage that desktop blog editors like Windows Live Writer, Word 2007 and w.bloggar cannot be used to update your blog. Though I must have a look at getting around this, I am sticking with using WordPress itself to do the editing for now (Dean Lee's port of FckEditor for WordPress is working out very well, spurious codes notwithstanding).

Are developers and designers overcomplicating their CSS?

When I have been tweaking the widgets in this blog, the thought crossed my mind that purveyors of open source blogging and CMS's may be overcomplicating matters with the CSS that they are writing. Using inheritance without much thought as to others having to pick it up is one irritation, but bunching styles together can confuse too. For instance, you can draw from two different styles for the same HTML element (it's what's going when you see class="class1 class2" in a tag definition), which is OK if done simply but can confuse matters when customisation is attempted later. Drupal particularly suffers from this bugbear, but it's there on WordPress too, though not to the same extent. Using a hierarchy to define and attach your styles (#id1 .class2 tag1 {style definition...} is the kind of thing that I have in mind), can also confound, even if I admit to finding the approach very useful for myself. I think that I know what's driving this: the need to cut down the bulk of CSS files but using the advanced features that I mentioned above without clear commenting and other documentation hampers later efforts. It would be nice if every developer of a theme to use in blogging or CMS software was forced to document their work extensively and share that documentation with interested users. After all, sharing is the whole purpose of their endeavours...

Oracle SQL Developer and MySQL

Because of my work, I recently have had a bit of exposure to Oracle SQL Developer, which I have been using as part of application development and testing activities. For further investigation, I decided to have a copy at home for further perusal (it's a free download) and it was with some interest that I found out that it could access MySQL databases. To accomplish this, you need Connector/J for MySQL so that communication can occur between the two. Though you quickly notice the differences in feature sets between Oracle and MySQL, it seems a good tool for exploring MySQL data tables and issuing queries.

FCKeditor and Drupal

My Drupal investigation is currently in hiatus, but I did get to exploring the world of modules and adding to the standard ones supplied. Drupal doesn't have a WYSIWYG editor supplied in the standard package, so I went and added one that I have used elsewhere: FCKEditor. Setting wasn't much of a problem until I encountered the following error: Unknown element of UniversalKey panel. The solution to the problem is to remove the reference to UniversalKey from the configuration file fckeditor.config.js. Since it took a spot of finding, here it is for posterity and so that I'll find again...

HTML Tidy for Windows

Drupal has modules (Import HTML and its helper Static HTML together make up one option) for importing static (X)HTML pages into its database, and it needs HTML Tidy to work. Since I am playing with the thing on Windows, I went out and snagged the version for that OS. Being either lazy or bloody-minded, I tried an XHTML page with PHP code embedded in it and, needless to say, the thing choked. I must try it with plain XHTML instead.

Open source CMS options

After reading an article in the latest issue of PC Plus, I got curious about the world of content management systems again. I went over to OpenSourceCMS to sample the CMS demos that they have got on there. Mambo and Joomla! (I wish they dropped that exclamation mark; it messes up automated grammar checking) are fully fledged CMS’s and look impressive too, though how they would fit into my online presence is something of an open question. Since I spied that PHP-Nuke uses themes, that is an attraction; I am already used to that mindset thanks to WordPress. While Drupal is seemingly less slick than the others, that could be an attraction in itself; it does offer themes but no rich text editing is available.

Though all of the above are built on top of PHP/MySQL, I ignored them for some reason when I last looked at open-source content management systems. That does seem a strange thing to do, but this was a while ago and the moderate cost of adding database functionality to my website was not something that I was willing to pay, though I have done so since for HennessyBlog.

Therefore, I ended up seeing what Plone (built on Zope and using the Python programming language) could do. What I was had in mind at the time was a replacement for Perl-powered photo gallery, and a CMS was never going to fit the bill; it still doesn’t. In any case, Plone left me with the impression that it was an all or nothing affair when I like coexistence of website components on a single server. Things may have changed since then, so giving it another go remains an option.

Now that I have decided to have a look at Drupal, the emphasis this time is not on using it as a photo gallery platform; if I wanted that, I’d go with the API for something like Flickr or Zooomr. This time, the emphasis on using a CMS to manage the visitor information directories on my website. It does coexist with the other website components, including WordPress and the aforementioned bespoke built photo gallery. Interestingly, Drupal does offer blogging functionality if I wanted it.

Set up involved a spot of work with MySQL before moving onto other things:

mysql -u adminuserid -p /* logging in*/
create database drupal; /*creating new database*/
grant ALL on drupal.* to adminuser identified by “**********”; /* granting access to new database */
quit; /* exiting */

Because it is easier to see what’s going on (not wrong, hopefully), I prefer command line working with MySQL. For some reason, Drupal comes only in tar.gz archives, so I extracted this into the web server directory and opened up the site in Firefox. Installation only requires the set-up of database access and is soon completed. A few things turned up in the status report that needed attention: cron, this can be run manually; activation of PHP Unicode and GD library (PHP’s gd_info function is a real help in testing this) extensions, editing of php.ini to remove commenting semicolons activated them and restarting Apache made them available; having a place to store uploads, the directory called files got created.

Since then, I have set about bending it to my will, not always an easy thing to do with software. The first thing to do was to give it a static home page. By default, Drupal places tasters for any nominated pages and stories on its home page and shows configuration instructions until you allow some content to filter through. However, adding the Front Page module allows you to override this behaviour and have something more static. It was an entry on Kehan’s Blog that set me heading in the right direction.

The next steps were to persuade the thing to allow external links to exist in menus (though patches exist, I have yet to learn how to apply them other than finding the nefarious piece of code and replacing, a considerable challenge that makes me wonder if there is not a better way to do it: with a module, perhaps?) and carry on the theme editing until it ties in with the rest of my site. Then, I’ll make the decision whether to replace my current workflow (Perl-powered pre-processing of XML into PHP/XHTML using XSLT and the Saxon parser followed by FTP upload to the web server) with this one. The automation of the former argues in its favour. We’ll see how things pan out…