Hugo Estrada's House of Wonder

A while ago I said that I may come back and enter detail instructions on how to install simple test on drupal 6 on Windows. I forgot about it, and, of course, I need that information now. So here it is, in its detailed glory, how to do this.

1. Download simple test from this link http://drupal.org/project/simpletest

2. Make sure that you have curl installed. Check whether curl has been installed by looking at your phpinfo() page, or running on the command line php -i . If you don't have it installed, install it. On windows, that means going to your php.ini, and uncommenting the line where it says php_curl.dll and potentially moving php_curl.dll to Windows/system32 More information on this link http://www.php.net/manual/en/curl.installation.php read the 28-Dec-2009 07:17 comment by wixelbomb for more details on it.

3. Run the patch on drupal 6 core. Oh, boy, was this fun 2 months ago.
First, information on applying the patch is given here http://drupal.org/patch/apply If you are using windows, that means that the utility that you need must be run in cygwin http://www.cygwin.com/ or you need http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ . That is actually not that bad. More information specific to windows on http://drupal.org/node/60179

What ended up being hard to figure out where you should run the patch. The answer to this, for simpletest, is your root drupal directory. Since I don't like to type too much, I copied and pasted D6-core-simpletest.patch to root, and ran the following command in cygwin

patch -p0 < D6-core-simpletest.patch

That should be it. Then you can have fun testing.

This was complicated to set up, but I am finally running a case. I may have to write a more detailed set of instructions on how to set it up on 6.x. The good news is that it is part of core on 7.

After running an update on a drupal site, I got the following error when looking at any content: Unknown column 'u.signature_format' in 'field list'.

There was this thread on it http://drupal.org/node/508666#comment-1783504

Someone said that they solved this by running a query. There was no query offered, but I was able to create one quickly by looking at the users install code:

alter table users add column signature_format smallint not null default 0

I spent about an hour battling the following error: Call to undefined function install_no_profile_error().

I had followed the directions on how to install Simple Test, and whenever I ran any test, even Simple Test's tests, I got that error.

After reading the following issue on their issue tracker http://drupal.org/node/341661#comment-2895990 they had some cryptic talk about the profiles/default. I couldn't really follow what they were saying since I thought that this may be some kind of configuration (about 90% of issues in Drupal can be solved through configuration settings). Soon after I learned enough to understand that they were talking about a file under the profile folder.

A quick look into my acquia site folder, and I found that profile/default was missing.

A quick copy and paste of the default folder from a clean drupal download into acquia's profile folder fixed the problem.

I had this idea that I want to try developing this site using as little modules as possible. Why? First, it is an interesting challenge to see how much you can actually do with drupal in its near pure state. Second, many modules pretty much replicate what you can do with drupal already. Sure, writing a module is fun, but it is just faster to add another taxonomy category and/or write a bit of php to add wanted functionality.

Hopefully this will make it easier to run updates to drupal core, since the number of dependencies are reduced.

What I will install are the anti-spam modules, which I honestly believe should be included as part of the normal distribution.

Update:

Since I have kept this this to the minimum for about a year, I think I can say I accomplished this. That and a huge amount of procrastinating spirit-force that my blog creates in me.