Posts tagged with "drupal"

One of the main advantages of a statically generated blog (like Octopress) over a blogging platform that uses a database (WordPress, Drupal) is performance.

My humble blog doesn't get enough traffic for performance to be a consideration and I thought I wouldn't be able to discern any improvement.

This graph is from Google Webmaster Tools. Can you guess when the blog migration from Drupal to Octopress was done ? Yes - that's right - the middle of September (17th to be precise).

Undeniably, the performance is much better (fastest response time of 128 milliseconds) and reliable since the move to Octopress. Unfortunately, this 'before' and 'after' comparison isn't ideal. Previously, the blog was running Drupal 7, configured with a small number of modules using MySQL and hosted on cheap ($6 a month) shared hosting with Bluehost.

The performance spikes (high of 2.5 seconds to access a page !) are probably related to high usage of the Linux server my blog was co-hosted on (rather than a specific Drupal performance problem).

When I migrated to Octopress, I also moved the blog to Amazon S3 storage so it's not entirely clear how much S3 has contributed to the relatively stable and fast response times of the blog since mid-September.

With hindsight, I really wish I had phased the migration by deploying Octopress for a month on the same Bluehost hosting (using rsync) and then moved to Amazon S3. Still, it's a but late for that now.

However, it looks like I am ready for the SlashDot effect.

This blog and the handful of modules I use has been upgraded to the final version of Drupal 7.0 which was released today.

I was quite pleased that I used Drupal 7 from the early beta versions and then tracked the D7 release candidates as this gave me valuable experience in upgrading Drupal 7 relatively quickly while preserving my additional modules without losing all my data which always helps. It's worth noting that although I barely scratch the surface of Drupal 7's wide range of functionality, the quality, reliability and performance of Drupal 7 was perfectly fine for this blog.

Personally (and rather selfishly), I hope that the formal release of Drupal 7.0 will encourage more developers to upgrade which, in turn, which provide impetus for more Drupal modules (and themes) to be ported and made available for Drupal 7.

Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, posted a interesting set of reviews looking back on 2010 with his hopes and predictions for the coming year for:

• Drupal - the open source content management system.
• Mollom - comment spam service with commercial pricing for larger sites.
• Acquia - Dries' startup offering Drupal based services including hosted Drupal sites
• Drupal Gardens.

People never ask me Hey Norman - what modules have you installed thus far on this wonderful Drupal 7 powered blog ?

• Archive - monthly archives.

• Disqus - although I had some problems with this module so I am currently using a simple Disqus block.

• Global Redirect - ensures that 'node/1234' is redirected to '2010/21/22/blog-post'.

• Google Analytics - mandatory to torment myself over visitors statistics using GA.

• Markdown Filter - although I haven't fully embraced this yet. Old (raw HTML) habits die hard.

• Mollom - Disqus provides built-in spam protection but I use Mollom to guard the user registration and contact forms which is very effective.

• Pathauto - to map Drupal nodes to my date based permalink structure.

• Token - required by Pathauto

• Tagadelic - marvellous, configurable, graphic 'Tags' page to aid Bill's navigation of this site.

• Wysiwyg - evaluating various options but not found nirvana as yet.

• XML sitemap - produces search engine friendly sitemap.

I also modified the 'page.tpl.php' template to reinstate my wonderful, award winning rotating tagline (or slogan in Drupal terminology).

Curiously, I haven't enabled the D7 core 'blog' module as I don't need multi-user blogs. Each post is simply an 'Article'.

The date for the long awaited Drupal 7 release has been announced as 5 January 2011.

Dries should just play this video. Then he should simply read the following and leave the stage.

Straight as an arrow\ Defect defect\ Not straight, not so straight\ Reject reject\ Towards anti-social\ Solo solo

Standing on the stairs\ Cold, cold morning\ Ghostly image of fear\ Mayday, mayday\ Gonna leave this region\ They'll take me with them

Drupal 7\ Drupal 7\ Drupal 7\ Drupal 7\ Drupal 7\ Drupal 7\ Drupal 7\ Drupal 7

Siebel customers (and employees alike) all over the world are busy enjoying Metalink3 which has recently replaced SupportWeb.

Everyone (well me, mainly) is taking great delight in taunting Oracle DBA types with incredulous cries of 'Sorry - did you say you're still on legacy Metalink2 ?'

A number of readers, impressed with this bleeding edge technology and dying for more, have emailed me asking why this humble Siebel blog hasn't yet been updated to Drupal 6.0 RC2.

Consequently, I downloaded the distribution for Drupal 6 Release Candidate #2 and, unusually for me, I even took the time to read 'UPGRADE.txt'. I followed the instructions therein and took the site offline so any visitors receive a configurable, professional looking message: 'This site is being upgraded to bleeding edge CMS technology. Please spread the news and don't forget to taunt any Oracle DBA's.'

After that completely unnecessary configuration change (I have no visitors), I was then unable to login to initiate the upgrade. Sigh. Thankfully, I discovered this article from another early adopter which enabled me to regain control of my original site.

I attempted the upgrade from Drupal 5.3 which failed to modify the database schema and produced a worrying number of SQL errors.

Not to be defeated, I read this helpful article which implied the Drupal 5.x system should be running the latest stable release (5.6) which seemed eminently sensible advice.

I quickly upgraded from Drupal 5.3 to 5.6. Only I couldn't because my site was now inaccessible after the partial, incomplete upgrade so I had to hold my breath while I restored from yesterday's MySQL database backup which worked perfectly.

Then I upgraded Drupal from 5.3 to 5.6, having naively convinced myself this would fix the problem, and duly repeated the upgrade process to 6.0 RC2 which promptly failed with the same dire, database related, results.

Still, this is a beta release after all and sure enough (as always), some other poor soul has already been there and done that.

No fix yet. Roll on RC3.

A couple of interesting papers discussing the portability issues and challenges involved when trying to port Drupal to the freely available versions of Oracle and DB2.

Just installed and configured Drupal 4.7.3 and noted an announcement asking for volunteers to test newly added support for the Oracle database.

Most open source, content management systems (WordPress, Joomla et al) use MySQL so it will be interesting to see whether there is much demand for a CMS running on an Oracle database.

On a similar note, Oracle are likely to confirm that the next major release of Siebel (8.0) will be available on the Linux platform. The official announcement is expected at Oracle OpenWorld later this month. This isn't wholly unexpected as support for Linux in Siebel 8.0 was included in the public Statement of Direction (May 2006).

The availability of the Siebel on Linux is is likely to be an attractive option for smaller companies, some of whom who already deploy the Siebel database on a Linux platform.