I’ve been following Chris Pirillo’s recent venture Gnomepal (and let’s face it who hasn’t). He has been building possibly the ultimate community site, I don’t quite get it yet still intrigued. So when I heard it was live I knew I had to check it out.

When I logged in and saw it I was amazed at what I saw. At the current date (3rd Arpril 2008) Gnomepal is still less than a week old yet it has the features and quality design of a web site that’s been months in the making, I knew I had to check out what was driving this thing.

So it turns out this site is powered by a technology called Drupal which is a community supported open source ‘Community Plumbing’ so to speak. It has the core already built with the ability to add more later. It is very modular, so modular you can even just download a feature from the Drupal web site and install it onto your Drupal installation for yourself, this is some seriously cool stuff we’re talking about here.

So, I knew I had to try it. I downloaded drupal and Installed it on a little web space I have free tried it, nothing. It turns out you need Apache web server, PHP 4.0 and MySQL Installed before it will work… It was at this point I nearly gave up. But it was at this point that it struck me that I had had a web server, SQL server and a PHP server running on my computer at one point so I decided to test it like that.

After about 10 minutes of searching I found something very cool, a portable web server, Webserver On a Stick or WOS. Not only does this allow you to carry your own version of portable Apache, PHP and SQL around in your pocket it also allows you to download other things with it that work right out of the box, Including an installation of Drupal. So you can effectively have your own fully working version of Drupal to mess around with right on your computer. Just select drupal as one of the optional things when you donwload and it will install along with the web server, really cool.

I shall mess with this for a  while.

If you ant to check out my Gnomepal account got http://www.gnomepal.org/id/smorrell not that there’s much there yet, but there hopefully will be…