There is nothing easy about building a multiple-location, multi-lingual website. The options are getting better and better however to make this as smooth as possible.
I’ve been blogging about my experiences, starting from scratch, learning the LAMP stack and delivering a high quality, high performance solutions. I’ve had my head in a few books lately; a php beginners book, a php advanced book, and a Drupal Pro book. My eyes are heavy but I have a prototype to my end solution.
Building a solr search driven search site is completely painless, and getting faceted search options are completely customizable. Out of the box, Drupal gives our website about 60% of our functionality.
However, be prepared: Drupal is a whole other language unto itself. Coming from a nice SDK an a .Net environment, the vast number of function names you need to remember is quite dawnting. .Net feels much cleaner- that being said I think I can do much more with the php code.
My next steps will be mastering the Jquery integration. This site needs to feel real 2.0, and I plan on keeping up with key AJAX function.
That’s it for me tonight, time for some sleep.
I’ve been off a few days because moving houses, but I’ve been busy at work. I’ve taken what I’ve learned from my last post, and starting getting my hands dirty.
I’ve been soley developing in Microsoft products since I started developing, so this transition has been a slow one for me. I’ll share my pains in the hopes I can help someone else.
Installing the LAMP stack on Amazon can be a breeze if you do it right. Read these instructions for a quick setup with a VNC access. I’ll briefly outline the steps from base install to solr:
- Do yourself a favour and download the Firefox extention
- When you create an instance of a server you have a long list of pre-installed packages to choose from- find the Hardy Ubuntu AMI
- Install the LAMP stack using the command prompt (see link above) it also installed PHPMySql
- For the newest Java install I used the Add Program options in the GUI, real simple
- I downloaded solr from the site and followed the instructions on the site, worked like a charm
My path was riddled with many different dead ends when installing this, but in the end it could have been a 1 hour job. My main stumbling block was getting vncserver to run with the amazon getting-started AMI builds. Essentially I had to install everything manually, which is NO fun.
Next steps: trying to get solr to run as a webservice so I can access it internally. Right now it is behind the 8983 port and I can’t access it from the web. I’ll let you know how I get on later, and hopefully I’ll have my proof of concept all completed.
