Submitted by Andrew on 13 January 2010 - 8:21pm
As part of my ongoing dabblings with Drupal, I wanted a couple of local installations to act as a test bed for various versions. Now that I have a couple of live domains running Drupal in multi-site mode I really don't fancy breaking them by doing anything silly - this is where the local setup comes into play.
Last weekend I wiped my old Gentoo Linux server and installed Ubuntu Server Edition. Gentoo has served me well over the years and I'll happily use it again but I wanted to try out Ubuntu Server for a bit. So after a painless install of that, automatically installing the LAMP stack along the way, I decided to download the latest Drupal 7.x-dev snapshot and put on it. This proved to be timely as it seems the first alpha release of Drupal 7.x-dev is to be released this Friday (15 Dec 2010).
The Drupal 7 installer is already much-improved from v6, and so is the administration interface. The pseudo-modal layer look a bit clunky but it's definitely a step-forward from Drupal 6.
Tonight I wiped my MacPorts installation on my home MacBook Pro and installed fresh with PHP 5.3, Apache 2.2 and MySQL5. On here went a fresh install of Drupal 6.15.
So I now have the current and future releases of Drupal, on two OS's, under two different versions of PHP to play with to test upgrade paths as Drupal 7 progesses through its alpha and beta phases whilst leaving my live domains in tact.
The various RDF-related modules are next to be installed as I've still only really skimmed the surface of these; largely down to not wanting to risk messing up my live domains. This is now a possibility and it will be interesting to see what opportunities they open up.