Drupal

For years, the Egyptian Cuisine section on the Baheyeldin web site has been one of the most visited parts of the site. Visitors were asking for recipes and not just background information and history.

So, today, we launched the Egyptian Cuisine Recipes just as visitors requested, with more than 70 recipes ready for you to try.

Two new reports have been added to the adsense module, in addition to the detailed report of each click, IP address/host, date/time and page.They are the top pages, which shows pages generating the most clicks, and another report for the number of clicks per day.

The top pages report will have surprises for you I am sure.

And according to June statistics, the adsense module for 4.7 has been downloaded 1,441 times, ahead of feedback 4.7 with 1,082 times.

Nick Wilson of Performancing.com kindly emailed me to let me know that they have installed my userpoints module recently. Performancing produces tools for bloggers so they can publish from FireFox, and also metrics for blogs. The site runs Drupal. See user points in action on their site.

Last January, Forrester asked what does corporate blogging mean? Boris of  Bryght has answered the question on his blog.  Later, Forrester  has released their report on blogging platforms, for a hefty price tag: 

• The Forrester Wave: Blogging Platforms Q2 2006 $995 for 15  pages.
• Drupal's Blogging Platform Integrates Community and Publishing $795 for 6 pages.

The price seems outrageous, but this is how Corporate IT executives  gets info, instead of researching it themselves.

Ruby as a "quick and easy interpreted scripting language for object oriented development" did not really pick up until the Ruby On Rails (RoR) platform started taking off.It was only a matter of time for full-fledged Content Management Systems  (CMS) based on Ruby on Rails to emerge.Here is a list of a few I found out, still the early stages.

• RadiantCMS, licensed under the MIT License. It seems at a very early stage though, but has a small library of "third party behaviors" (modules/plugins), and templating is via special markup (check the demo).
• RailsFrog is another RoR CMS in the early stages as well. They need programmers, and Drupal's Ber Kessels is on board there.

After spending almost a month and a half in prison, Alaa has finally been released.

Resource

• My original post on Alaa's detention, dated May 14.
• Alaa's post in solidarity with the Muslim Brotherhood (in Arabic it says: "A thousand greetings to the Muslim Brotherhood"). One has to really taste what others go through to sympathize with them.
• Washington Post article on Alaa's release.
  

We just released a new version of the Drupal Adsense module to the repository.

Update: this article is for Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06). If you are using later versions, or other Linux distributions, then visit the following links:

• Installing PHP APC on GNU/Linux Gusty Gibbon 7.10 and (Debian).
• Installing PHP APC on GNU/Linux CentOS 5.

APC is a op-code cache for PHP that eliminates the parsing and compiling of script(s) for every page hit. Unlike Zend, it is truly free, and seems to have a lot of commuity momentum behind it lately.

As with all optimizations, there is a trade off. APC can use more memory on your server than without it.

The instructions below assumes that you have full control of your server, whether a physical dedicated server or a virtual private server.

Although one can always compile from source, this is more time consuming than using Debian's excellent apt-get.

Here is how I did it on two machines, with one more to go.

Flock has their site running on Drupal, and it looks great.Here is the designer's blog with some more details.Remember that Chris Messina, often contributor to Drupal in the area of theming and usability, used to work at Flock. Read more on Chris' blog.Here is the Digg discussion on the design.

While visiting Egypt in summer of 2005, I realized that most people are still on dialup, and hence pay per minute for the connection. This is in contrast to North America where dialup, although slow, incurrs no per-minute charges (local calls are free).The same is true in other parts of the world where local calls are metered.This practice precludes reading references online. Talking to Drupal present and potential users in Egypt, South Africa and India, one question kept coming up: "is there a Drupal book I can buy and read?"So, when Ian Dickson posted in July 2005 on  Drupal, I tried contacted him, offering to collaborate on a Drupal book. I got no response though.