Intranet extravaganza!

Submitted by Chad on Sun, 06/10/2007 - 9:01pm.

• Tech

For those of you keeping score at home, here is what I did this weekend: I created a banner for my band site acousticbasement.com using Gimp rather then photoshop. I pretty much hated it. But I think the banner came out ok.

I also loaded Drupal on my desktop to serve as an intranet home pass drug test page. I am pretty much an animal when it comes to drupal these days. I am familiar with just about every module known to man, and I am starting to delve into the greater depths of theming. The only laptop battery problem with that, is theming takes time, no really, I mean TIME. Here is the quick rundown on installing drupal on an intranet at home. You need mysql apt-get install mysql-server

php5

apt-get install php5

apache2

apt-get install apache2

My suggestion if you want to do this is to go over to howtoforge.com. I linked to the article specifically for Ubuntu, but basically you can get any server setup you want and the guy that does most of the debian/ubuntu stuff is a genius.

Once I set up my internal web server I went ahead and installed phpmyadmin

apt-get install phpmyadmin

and created an empty database for my drupal install.

Then all I did was download drupal 5.1 from drupal.org and threw it into my /var/www directory. I navigated to and instantly had a drupal intranet home page.

Yay. I downloaded the modules I knew I was going to need for the intranet such as: audio, fileshare, pathauto, menu, webcams, birthdays, dhtml_menu, googleajaxsearch, photoblog, video, webfm, blogger, jstools, phpfreechatm views, calendar, mugshot, printable, views_bonus, chatroom, fckeditor, mysite(beta version), privatemsg, views_bookmark

Those where what I knew I needed to start, but I'm sure I will get more as time permits. Basically I'm looking for inter-household communications and media gateway action.

I also downloaded the Zengine that the folks over at lullabot.com put together and downloaded the test theme zenzen. I did this mainly because I am trying to learn as much as I can about theming, and they are great about commenting code.

I did some basic shifting of blocks and put a the nice google ajax search right on the main page. I made sure a nice calendar was present so we could schedule family events, and made links to all 420000 of my personal web sites, almost like a quick favorite places on the top menu bar.

I then went ahead and installed a great web streaming media package called Jinzora. Essentially this is the same type of install, you place it under your web directory, in my case /var/www/jinzora2 and then create an empty database. Navigate to and follow the on screen instructions. When finished, you have a streaming media server that can be browsed to by any computer in your home. Here is a screenshot of mine.

It takes your library, strips it of the id3 tags, and sorts your library. If you are in the kitchen and want to listen to Foo Fighters, you just click on rock--foofighters, or search for foofighters, or a million other ways to navigate to them, then click play or play random. Bam, it automatically pics your default player and starts streaming the album over your network. Wow, cool as hell. So I got this all set up in a matter of 20 minutes, having never set eyes on this before. I got thinking, why not do this with movies? So I set up a new folder called /var/www/jinmovies and put a fresh copy of jinzora2 in it. Set it up just like I did with my music collection except this time instead of pointing it to my music, I pointed it to my movies (all of which are perfectly legal copies and all that legal crap). Sure enough, it read all my movies and created an online library. And sure enough, when I wanted to watch a movie, I went ahead and clicked on it and sure enough, it began streaming. Sweetness. So now I just went ahead and made links of my drupal main page to my music and movie library, and can watch and listen to my collection anywhere in the house. Yay.

All that, and I wrote a song too. It has been a good weekend for this geek.

More to come...