Perl

How can we efficiently deploy Drupal websites? Installing a Drupal website is rather straightforward. But it involves many small critical steps that always waste my time. One day, I came up to an idea that using a simple Perl script to (semi-)automate the procedures would save both time and accuracy resulting in higher productivity. Also, systematically generating new Drupal websites helps me manage them well later. In this post, I would like to share my approach to setting up new Drupal websites.

1. Overview

A Drupal installation roughly requires the following steps:

WARNING: Thanks to a generous feedback from J, I have realized that the following method using ISO-2022-JP for Japanese emails is obsolete. Accordingly, I would like to mark the main part of this article as NOT-RECOMMENDED. Instead, in the comment column below, I have posted a fixed script that uses UTF-8. This UTF-8 based emailing script should work not only for Japanese but also for any other non-English languages as well.

I occasionally help my friends who are running a company regularly dealing with hundreds of customers. Sending multiple emails based on a single sending list requires a kind of batch email construction and sending. In this article, I introduce a Perl script approach to accomplish that kind of tasks.

For an introduction to sending an email from the command line by Perl, see this previous article.

Here is an index to this article:

• Overview
• File resources

With the ability to send emails in the command line, we can imagine that some more practical tasks become feasible:

• Hooking it up to CGI applications or cron to send status reports, alerts, etc.
• Composing dynamically formatted emails and sending them to a large number of people in a sending list.