Project - Drupal In Oberlin: Unexpected

Some weeks after my last post, I got in contact with an old friend from back in my San Francisco residency days.  Now out of the real estate business, Tom would find himself back into his home state of Ohio.  In only a brief time, Tom had already begun a community-based project in Drupal.  Using his skills, he has set up a site where Oberlin residents now can find out about ANYTHING going on in town.  Other people can now post events.

While the site is looking really good and very organized, Tom still finds his "design-fu" weak and asked me if I might come up with something.  Without a deadline to this project, it was perfect timing given my current workload at the time and an upcoming convention. Who knew that a Drupal project would find me some weeks after my last post? 

With a completed WordPress site behind me, I decided to bide my time before taking on more projects or starting new ones.  Honestly, with an upcoming weekend away from home (and a performance on that weekend's Saturday night), I didnt want to get involved in any one thing since I needed to get my arse in gear.   I was still idle when I got back, slowly getting back into my pace of household chores and other mundane tasks.  However, outside of a 3D graphics project, I found myself really wanting to get a move on with this project.  My only hope was that I could still learn more about the functionality aspect to Drupal despite that I was doing more of a design makeover rather than anything else.

Tom gave me the database, the site's files and a bit of instruction on how I might do a live site > localhost migration.  First thing I did was get to know the localhost file locations for a couple of server configuration files to help me get a 4MB+ database imported.  In the case of my Ubuntu-based LAMP setup, the php.ini file was relatively easy to find (/etc/php5/apache2).  The "upload_max_filesize" and "post_max_size" were changed to 12M since my file was a little over 10MB.  In addition, I wanted my database to be a different name so I changed the first few lines of the .sql file to create a dB called "inoberlin".  Import went smoothly...at least for now.