Drupal

Regarding Druplicon, Drupal's mascot, I have the same feelings about his eyes. The official history details how its eyes are supposed to have the infinity sign in them.While walkah prays to the Druplicon, and Robert Douglass sings its praise, while others morphed into a more evil looking Druplicon, some do share my dislike. Someone proposed to politely replace it.

Drupal 4.7 was released today after a full year in development.Read the full release announcement for Drupal 4.7 which has the new features. The "offline for maintenance" feature in that release is something I wrote sometime back.Additional coverage on Digg, CreativeBits and Free Software Magazine, Performancing.

A friend's site that runs Drupal 4.6 is becoming more popular by the month. With increased popularity, comes increased traffic, and the need for more resources.

Problem: Slow Site

After moving to a dedicated server, things were better for a while, then in late March to early April, users were reporting page load times that are too slow. I mean really slow, as in 25 seconds per page per request.

Hardware is not the issue here. This is a Debian Linux server with a dual Pentium 4 2.8GHz with 2GB or RAM.

Investigation: CPU Bound

After logging in and doing some investigation, I saw the following output from vmstat:

The last time I tried to count Drupal sites using the empirical method of searching Google, there were 58,400 sites running Drupal. That  was in January 2006.Today, the same query says 75,800 sites!If this method is accurate, we have 29.79% growth in a mere one quarter.Phenomenal ... 

2bits.com my Drupal development and customization consultancy has launched a new unique looking theme for its site. This was long in the making, but we are very happy with the end result as it looks fresh and unique. Thanks to the excellent design and artistic skills of Ivan Raszl of Creativine.com. Ivan also designed the baheyeldin.com theme.Apart from the new theme, this is a plain corporate brochure type of site, running on 4.6, with a few demos of modules I've written (all available on Drupal.org, such as stockapi, currency, feedback and sitemenu).

Here is a quick guide on what you need to develop modules for Drupal, with useful links to get you started. First, you need to know what is Drupal is, and what it can do. You then need to learn PHP, if you do not know it already. After which you have to setup a development environment. You need a computer of course.

I think that Drupal as a community is now at a crossroads.

Having been at the Drupal Conference in Vancouver from February 7th to  9th, I was overwhelmed by what was happening. There are too many people in attendance, and talking about all sorts of things. Two consulting companies had a whole contingent each in attendance. These are Trellon and CivicActions.

So Far So Good

So far, Drupal's core has been contributed to by volunteers, with just Dries Buytaert and Steven Wittens as committers of patches to core. There is no influence from large shops or corporations.

Here are some notes from the Drupal Conference held as part of the OSCMS Summit in Vancouver British Columbia from February 7 to 9, 2006.

It was a gruelling trip for me, leaving home at 5:30 am to catch a 7:30 am flight to Vancouver. I missed the morning sessions of the first day because of that. Coming back, I took the red eye at 11 pm, arriving 6:45 am Friday.

The address module in Drupal's E-Commerce suite does not allow users that are not registered (anonymous users) to complete the checkout and payment. Thiscan cause loss of business due to users not wanting to register. There has been bugs filed against this, such as: 37220 Anonymous purchases, with patches.Since not everyone is able to apply patches, I am attaching a pre-patched version of the address.module for 4.6, as a zip file. 

The Linkpoint API module is part of the contributed set of modules for Drupal's E-Commerce suite.It was originally written as a quick and dirty hack to the Authorize.net module. As time passed by, E-Commerce APIs changed, and the Linkpoint API module no longer worked.Recently, a client wanted to use that module, and it did not work. So, I modified it to work again, and behave properly. The nice thing is that test mode also works. Comes in handy for testing before going live.The changes are back in the repository, after checking with Gordon Heydon, E-Commerce maintainer.