I got Drupal all installed and working problerly. I started adding some Modules when problems started occurring.
Basically, the system table that contains file locations for Modules and Themes is putting the location of files in the wrong path. Microsoft Frontpage creates a _vti_cnf folder and puts files with the sam name as the parent folder in it. These files contains information Frontpage uses to manage the files in the parent folder. In my system table, the paths end up being like this: modules/_vti_cnf/user.module instead of modules/user.module. I went through the system table and manually edited all of these and got the web site working again. When I added another Module, they all went back and the site is messed up again.
What's the easiest way to fix this and how can I keep it from happening again?
If Drupal wanted to be "Frontpage friendly" it would ignore all folders starting with an underscore (this would keep it from reading other folders like '_private', '_fpclass', '_themes' and '_borders' if they existed.
Comments
I don't want to offend you,
I don't want to offend you, and I certainly can't speak for the community, but I have a feeling that Drupal wasn't meant to be MS Frontpage friendly (please correct me if I'm wrong). I understand if that is what you are most comfortable using, and it is nice that to be able to edit a file and upload it all in the same program. But I think because MS FP does folders the way it does, that is probably a reason why you should avoid it for this type of site.
I wasn't aware that it had PHP support, but I haven't used it in a few years. Are you editing modules or templates with it, or are you just using it to upload the modules? If you are just using it to upload, you probably want to look into FTP client for this.
I'm not offended.
I'm not offended. FP certainly has it quirks.
As for FP supporting PHP: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA011092991033.aspx
I use an external editor any way. It's just nice to have files uploaded/downloaded and put into your editor as if they were on your on HD. Some sites that support FP don't let users have a choice. These folks wouldn't be able to run Drupal, which is unfortunate. Its an awesome CMS.
I was also hoping to contribute to Drupal. I made contributions to PHPLib when PHP was first becoming known (under 1 million users).
If I did all the fixes to make it FP friendly, what do you think the chances are of having it put into the core system?
If you did all the fixes ...
If I did all the fixes ... and it worked properly there may be a good chance. But I can't really speak for the Devs and how high that is on their roadmap, I'm just a lurker.
I don't know if that type is on these boards, but I wanted to catch your message before some troll came by with a "j00 suck00rz, d0wn w/ m1cR050ft00rz" comment. Maybe I just spend to much time reading slashdot.</offtopic>
Maybe after the WebDav module gets completed, there may be a way for people to edit their drupal sites in something like FP or DreamWeaver. It really is exciting to see all the new modules that are coming out for Drupal, especially the SoC projects.
If you want the feature and
If you want the feature and have discovered how to implement it, then your best bet is to submit patches against Drupal core. I suspect that it is late in the release cycle to do this, but unless you submit the patches as an interested party, it is significantly less likely to get in.
In the handbook, look at the 'Contributing to Drupal', and the 'Coding Standards'.
-sp
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
NP, but...
it's an easy patch, I'm going to implement it, but for drupal team, that surely know drupal sources better than me, would be trivial...
I think that on IIS (maybe driven by an option) with the dir "CVS" should be included at least "_vti_cnf". Or much better, a new option that allows to set the a list of patterns to ignore.
This is not a "Front Page" problem; I understand that you can became mad just earing the name "Front Page" (...well, I do :) )
But Front Page Server Extensions (FPSEs) are used by largely used programs, not just FP: i.e. "Web Folders" (I don't know the exact name in english version of windows) the FPSEs client integrated in windows (file) explorer; and Visual Studio.
The problem is that if you use FPSEs also just once to access the drupal installation you CAN destroy it...
I.e. if you do any write operation on a folder, FPSEs CAN decide to create "_vti_cnf" folders in any subfolder; the problem is that _vti_cnf contains files with same name as you find in the parent folder, but they contains just "MS-garbage".
An this make the drupal module system insane :) It try to load this files as modules, loading just garbage...
IMHO this problem should at least listed in known issues...
PS: I've used FPSEs with the XP's "Web Folders" to update the site... this because FTP access of my hosting service is a pain and sometime it don't want to delete folders... while FPSEs just works fine for file management, such as move and delete...
Could you change permissions?
If you left the FP directories and files there, but changed permissions on them to something like 640 or 600 for the files and 750 or 700 for the directories, depending on the server config Drupal might not be able to read them.
I have no idea how your host works, so I'm assuming the user account you upload with is different from the user account the web server runs as.
And I'm assuming that Drupal will ignore files it can't read rather than throwing an error.
So a lot of assumptions there, but something to try out maybe.
--
Anton
same issue... has it been resolved?
I am finding the same issue when I try to manually upload new themes by dropping them into the drupal folder using Front Page.
Has this issue been resolved at all or is there a patch for it???
This is Front Page behavior
Not Drupal. Front page is modifying files and permissions. Drupal cannot do that.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide