Sunday, July 27, 2008

A 10 minute Drupal Demo for a small business website

A real neat demo! I Love Drupal!!

Watch the video and understand -> menus, themes, blocks, views, modules, ubercart store

Video created by Acquia
"Acquia provides commercially supported Drupal distributions, technical support, and value-added network services for Drupal. However, the Drupal project, Drupal.org, and the Drupal Association pre-date and function independently from Acquia. Acquia functions as a member of the community to advance the Drupal technology and promote Drupal adoption. We’re one drop in the Drupal ocean."


Saturday, July 26, 2008

Theming in Drupal 6 - Key Learnings at the Lullabot workshop

Lullabot





1. If we did not define a node.tpl file in our theme:
Druapl6 , the default file is that available in with the node module.
Drupal5, the default file was available with the php-engine

2. All new Preprocessor functions in Drupal 6:
Preprocess functions only apply to theming hooks implemented as templates. The main role of the preprocessor is to setup variables to be placed within the template (.tpl.php) files. – this means that the variables defined with in the Preprocessor functions are available only with in the template files.
Template suggestions can be made in the preprocessor functions, based on available hooks

3. Use the themer info to identify which theme function is associated with a particular content and update the same as in the case of
function mytheme_preprocess_taxonomy_term_page(&$variables) {
}The same hooks are also available from inside these theme functions.

The main Diffference in theming in Drupal 5 vs Drupal 6
In Drupal 5 the theme could be altered using the _phptemplate_variables function. The templates could be altered only from the template.php file. The only way to override the formatting at the module level was to override rendering in the template.php file.
In Durpal 6 since we have the preprocess functions we can access the templates at the module level

Read more at Theme guide (Drupal 6)

Friday, July 25, 2008

Drupal 6 Corporate website Launched

Netlink Technologies LTD, Chennai Launches Drupal 6 corporate website. Visit http://drupal.org/node/287645 to see a short writeup!

Saturday, July 19, 2008

A very successful Chennai Drupal Meet II

The Second Chennai Drupal Meet was a great success. We had Kamalakannan and Antony explain Drupal 6 and Views in Drupal.

The power of open source was such, that we all felt like one while sharing our ideas and experiences in working with Drupal.

Vijay was a big contributor, maintains a large portal mylifetime.com. The site was designed and developed by Lullabot and Vijay is the team lead in Chennai maintaining the site. The insights he shared based on his Drupal experiences were great. Checkout the writeup on mylifetime at the Lullabot site.

Vinodh's enthusiasm for Drupal deserves a special mention! He has introduced Naresh to our Chennai Drupal Group. Naresh is only a fews days in to Drupal but participated actively. He recorded the entire session.

Frédéric is French. He recently met up with Netlink Technologies and was very interested in being a part of the Chennai Drupal Community.

Jovemac has been involved in creating quiet a few Drupal sites. He has been a key person to support and provide encouragement to have a Chennai Drupal meet!

We also had with us Ranjith, Gomathy and Shiva. We were in all 11 of us. Was indeed a great meeting. Thanks everybody for coming to the meeting and making it a great success! Cheers to the Chennai Drupal Community!

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Search and Drupal

Trying to understand the Search functionality of Drupal better. There may be a need to integrate with 3rd party search tools to enable a more efficient search. Stumbled upon Solr Search. The community is extremely active! Had Robert Douglass answering my questions at http://groups.drupal.org/node/13112.

Some other interesting links in Drupal and Solr:
http://people.apache.org/~hossman/apachecon2006us/faceted-searching-with-solr.pdf
http://www.lullabot.com/blog/new-solr-search-module-works
http://robshouse.net/blog-post/fosdem-2008-drupal-apachesolr-module-0

A site using Solr: http://www.netflix.com/BrowseSelection

Chennai Drupal Meet II - Please sign up!

Visit http://groups.drupal.org/node/13072 and Sign up!

Thursday, July 3, 2008

DRUPAL SITE PERFORMANCE

Terminologies

Load balancing
: Is the technique of sharing work load among many resources so no single resource gets over loaded!
e.g DNS Load balancing -is to distribute requests to different servers though resolving the domain name to different IP addresses of servers, Database Load balancing - is to balance database access requests among cluster of database servers, in order to achieve database scalability and high availability

memcached
: High performance, memory-object caching, used in speeding up dynamic web applications by reducing the number of time the database has to be read.

Must reads on Drupal Performance
1. Essential performance tuning for Drupal web sites by Nadeau software consulting -- This article is FAB! Just what we need to do for a drupal site!!
2. Drupal performance by Dries Buytaert
3. Scaling with MySQL replication
4. Optimizing Apache and PHP
5. Server tuning Consideration - from Drupal Handbook

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Chennai Drupal Meet II

We are meeting again, this time with an Agenda. Please visit:http://groups.drupal.org/node/12877 and post your agenda.

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