So it came to be that the project i was working on – ARMADA, an online classified ads portal for properties in the Philippines and built on the Drupal framework, was to be moved from the testing and development servers of the original developers – dotPH.
After acquiring all the files, I tried to get it to run on my laptop, which was running Apache2 on Windows XP. Tough luck trying to emulate the dotPH servers. As a Drupal noob, I got a couple of hurdles that I couldn’t get past – the SWF file that displayed on all pages doesn’t show up and trying to login as a user gives me 404 error. I thought the first was caused by some setting about paths which I tried to find in vain. The second, i surmised, had something to do with the Drupal Clean URLs directive and the Apache mod_rewrite module, but was unsuccessful in solving this too.
I figured it’s a waste of time trying to fix this on a Windows machine so I decided to try to run it on my live Infragrey server which was running on Apache on RedHat.
My initial guesses were validated.
The path specification was indeed the fault in the SWF not showing up. Found it on the settings.php file located within the /sites/default/ directory. This setting also fixed a third problem i encountered when I got the files up on the live server – logging in, saving a setting, etc. – caused the page to redirect to wherever the URL-value of the setting pointed to. In this case, the value pointed to the development server of dotPH.
The problem about the 404 was fixed when I found that mod_rewrite was already enabled on the live server and all I needed to do was create a .htaccess file to define the values for the mod_rewrite directive.
All in a days work. 😉
