Post installation steps

Although everything is now installed and in place, there are a few more configuration steps required to get your site up and running.

Configure the Drupal file system

Since the site has been restored from a different environment, Drupal might attempt to save temporary files into the wrong location. To fix this:

  1. Select Configuration from the admin toolbar then select File system in the Media section on the left.
  2. Clear the Temporary directory box then click the Save button. This lets Drupal work out the best path for temporary files in your environment.

Initialise the theme

The LRC Drupal Template is provided with a custom theme which defines the appearance of the entire site. This theme is highly configurable, so you can change everything from the banner to the fonts to the colour schemes. Although we’ll learn about configuring the theme later, an important step in the installation process is to let the theme write out it’s stylesheet and other files according to the current configuration settings. Don’t worry too much about the details of this yet, just follow these steps:

  1. Click on the Appearance link in the top admin toolbar, then click on the settings link for the Indicia default theme:
../_images/drupal-select-indiciatheme-settings.png
  1. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page then click Save Configuration. This lets all the settings you can configure on this page be compiled into stylesheets and other site template files.

  2. Click the home icon in the top left corner of the page to check that your site is displaying OK.

    ../_images/drupal-home-page-after-install.png

Clean URLS

Drupal allows the URL your pages are accessed via to be made more readable. For example, the URL http://www.example.com/?q=my-page can be rewritten as http://www.example.com/my-page, making the URLs easier to remember. This setting requires a compatible configuration of the web server and may not be possible on all servers. To enable the setting, click the Configuration link in the admin toolbar, then click the Clean URLS link in the Search and metadata section. Your site will either detect that clean URLs are supported, in which case you can just click the Enable Clean URLs checkbox and click the Save configuration button, or if Drupal thinks that clean URLs are not supported then you will be presented with a Run the clean URL test button. Refer to the Drupal handbook for more information in this case.

Cron

Cron allows Drupal to run background tasks such as search indexing. Refer to the Drupal documentation for information on how to set this up.

Initialising Indicia

The LRC Drupal Template site, like all other Indicia powered websites, needs a website registration on the appropriate warehouse, in our case the BRC Community Warehouse. This provides a website ID and website password which your website will need in order to securely communicate with the warehouse’s web services. If you don’t already have these details, then please contact BRC. You can find further notes on this setup task on the Indicia documentation website.

Now, click on the Configuration link in the admin menu bar at the top of your Drupal site and click the Settings link in the IForm section, then fill in the following details:

  1. This page has already been configured to point to the BRC Community Warehouse and you can leave the Indicia Warehouse configuration option. If developing locally or using the BRC test warehouse then you can configure the URL to the warehouse here.
  2. Set the Indicia Website ID* to your website registration’s **website ID.
  3. Set the Password and Confirm password prompts to your website registration’s website password. This should be a secure password as it is used to authenticate record submissions from your website to the warehouse as well as all your site’s requests for report data.
  4. The GeoPlanet API Key is used to access the Yahoo! GeoPlanet place searching webservice, a handy addition to your online recording forms allowing people to search for towns and villages near to their sites. Follow the link on the configuration page to access the Yahoo! page where you can register to receive your own key which needs to be pasted into this box. The registration process is free and fairly quick.
  5. Bing API Key is only required if you plan to use the Bing map layers. Google layers no longer require an API Key.
  6. Map Settings allows you to pan and zoom an example map to show your record centre’s locality. This will then be used as a default setting for recording forms and reports. There is also a list of map reference systems which you can use to configure the default behaviuor of your forms. The default is for British National Grid support only, but you might want to tick the box to enable GPS Lat Long coordinates if you feel that is appropriate for your site.

Tip

If you shift drag on the map, you can quickly set the bounding box of an area to zoom into.

Save the settings page when you are done. Now, we want to check that the settings are OK. Click on the Configuration link in the admin toolbar at the top, scroll down and find the IForm Diagnostics link and click it. You will note a warning about a few possible API keys being missing – don’t worry as these are APIs which we are unlikely to use and where the key can be added to the configuration later if needs be. But, ensure that all the other checks this page outputs indicate success:

../_images/iform-diagnostics.png

The most likely type of failure you might observe at this point is for either the cache directory or interim image upload directories to be not writable by the web server. If this happens then the two folders you need to ensure are writeable are:

  • sites/all/modules/iform/client_helpers/cache
  • sites/all/modules/iform/client_helpers/upload

If you are not sure how to make these folders writable then it may be best to ask the adminstrator of your server.

Create your wildlife survey

The LRC Drupal Template is provided with wildlife recording forms that capture ad-hoc sightings as well as lists of records. You must create a survey on the warehouse into which records will be stored.

Tip

On the warehouse, a survey means a set of observations with a common purpose and methodology. The survey defines the attributes that are available for recording, for example a bat survey might capture information about the roost, whereas a plant survey might capture a DAFOR abundance. In our case, we’ll start out with a casual survey for ad-hoc sightings, but will learn how to setup other surveys later.

As part of the initial setup required to get the LRC Drupal Template site up and running, you will need to ask someone with access to the warehouse database to clone the template survey for you. The survey must be created first using the warehouse user interface. Setting up the survey’s structure can be done with the following database query which is correct for the live BRC Community Warehouse, replacing n with the ID of the survey you created:

select indicia.f_clone_survey(185, n, 1)

Once the survey exists on the warehouse, we need to link the survey to our recording forms. From your site’s home page, select Wildlife recording from the main menu, then select the Submit a sighting link. This will bring you to the submit a single sighting form, currently incorrectly configured as it needs to be pointed to your survey on the warehouse. Because you are logged in with admin rights, you can access the page’s Edit view from here so click on the Edit tab just below the page title. This shows a configuration form where you can change a huge number of settings about the online recording functionality of the current page. Scroll the page down a bit and in the Other IForm Parameters section, drop down the Survey control and choose your survey. There should only be one available as this will only show the surveys linked to your website registration. Scroll to the bottom and press the Save button when you are done.

Now, repeat these steps, this time for the Submit a list of sightings form.