Atrium Tip: Installing Open Atrium

If you haven’t checked out Open Atrium yet, you really should. Dubbed as an opensource “out of the box intranet”, it is a very polished and slick looking fork custom installation of Drupal designed to assist in establishing efficient collaboration within working groups, and most importantly as an important building block towards your own customized intranet system.

Because Atrium is still in its infancy stages, there are some bugs and growing pains. I hit a few during installation, but managed to get everything up and running after exploring some of the files causing errors. My installation is on a virtualized Ubuntu server 9.04 machine running apache2 and PHP 5.2.6 (hosted on VMServer 2). This has also been an ongoing issue over at the OpenAtrium Github issue tracker. (See http://github.com/developmentseed/Atrium/issues#issue/110)

Now on to the good stuff.

The first thing you need to do is setup the install as you would for drupal (download the tgz, untar, setup a database & user, change permissions on sites/default and sites/default/settings.php). Right away I got an error. Know why? I mv’d default.settings.php instead of cp’ing it to settings.php. First error squashed!

Next I editted settings.php and set my basedir since I’ve got Atrium installed in a subdirectory.

Then I got this error when running the install.php script: Fatal error: Call to undefined function date_make_date() in profiles/atrium_installer/atrium_installer.profile on line 233

Looking at ./atrium/profiles/atrium_installer/atrium_installer.profile, I saw that the error comes from the $date = line, but really all it looked like it was doing to me, was automatically set the timezone offset based on the timezone name, so I changed mine to the following, hardsetting the date_default_timezone_name and date_default_timezone_offset

// Set time zone
variable_set('date_default_timezone_name', 'America/Toronto');

// Calculate time zone offset from time zone name and set the default timezone offset accordingly.
// You dont need to change the next two lines if you change the default time zone above.
//$date = date_make_date('now', variable_get('date_default_timezone_name', 'US/Eastern'));
variable_set('date_default_timezone', '-4');


And then everything installed correctly!