Drupal-Chennai

An Introduction to Imagemagick with PHP

2012-01-04T17:34:00.001-08:00

Last week I had chance to work with imagemagick, I was amazed by seeing the list features available with this library to create or edit an image. Here is a brief on ImageMagick

What is imagemagick?
ImageMagick^® is a used to create, edit, compose, or convert images. It can read and write images in a variety of formats. Use ImageMagick to resize, flip, mirror, rotate, distort, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves.

How do I install ImageMagick?
For installing the ImageMagick in linux, download the build Imagemagick.tar.gz. Install the build as instructed here.

Unpack the build
$ tar xvfz ImageMagick.tar.gz

Configure and Compile
$ cd ImageMagick-6.7.4
$ ./configure
$ make

If ImageMagick configured and compiled without complaint, you are ready to install it on your system. Administrator privileges are required to install. To install, type
$ sudo make install

You may need to configure the dynamic linker run-time bindings:
$ sudo ldconfig /usr/local/lib

Finally, verify the ImageMagick install worked properly, type
$ /usr/local/bin/convert logo: logo.gif

For a more comprehensive test, run the ImageMagick validation suite. Ghostscript is a prerequisite, otherwise the EPS, PS, and PDF tests will fail.
$ make check

The same can also be installed in windows, instructions can be found here

Imagick is a native php extension to create and modify images using the ImageMagick API. This extension requires ImageMagick version 6.2.4+ and PHP 5.1.3+.
Install Imagick extension as usual way of pecl installation.
Copy the imagick.so to php ext directory usually (/usr/local/php/ext).
Edit the php.ini add the installed extension 'extension=imagick.so'
Restart the Apache

After Sucessful installation check the imagick availabilty with phpinfo()

If every thing goes fine, Now we can test it by writing a small program in php

<?php
header('Content-type: image/jpeg');
$image = new Imagick('image.jpg');
// If 0 is provided as a width or height parameter,
// aspect ratio is maintained
$image->thumbnailImage(100, 0);
echo $image;
?>

Imagick class constructed by loading a image 'image.jpg'.
In the next line a member function thumbnailImage is called to resize the image width as 100 pixels. This function takes two parameter first is width and next is Height.
Height assigned as 0 in the function to maintain the aspect ratio.

Implementing High Performance Drupal Sites

2011-11-14T22:44:00.001-08:00

Implementing High Performance Drupal Sites

View more presentations from Unimity

The Main Aspect covered during the Session:

What is “Performance”?
Different Layers of Performance
How to configure Drupal for Performance
Writing Drupal Modules for High Performance
Some Advanced Techniques & Caching Systems
Event Based Caching
Drupal 6 vs Drupal 7
Performance in Drupal 8

Questions Asked after the Session:

Q: Why did you use Panels for the Deccan Chronicle Home, though Panels could be a performance hazard?

A: Panels with the support of Ctools provides us many features to build a page or mini panel with drag and drop, create own layout, etc. These abstractions/features make panels a heavy module to use. Yes absolutely true, but we need to balance user experience and requirement with performance. Hence Panels was to give better user experience to the Editor who manages the site. Being aware of the implication on performance, we planned the cache very effectively by using time based (tradition) and event based cache clearing systems. We enabled the cache in all panes and pages in the panels.

Q: Is Boost a good option?

A: Boost is a good option for anonymous users and hosting is in shared environment, where you will not have option to install other advanced cache support modules like memecache or varnish. Boost will serve the cached static html files for the configured cache lifetime, once the lifetime expired static html page will be regenerated. When we compare Boost and Varnish, Boost caches the content and delivers it without disturbing MySql. Varnish works at a layer above Apache. Another difference is Boost uses the file system (disk) where as varnish uses RAM. Refer http://groups.drupal.org/node/46042, http://cruncht.com/95/drupal-caching/. The benchmarking helps to decide that varnish is better than Boost. As the time old concept RAM is faster than Disk. So if you have infrastructure to install Varnish then Varnish is the better option.

Q: Writing custom query to get required information from node vs using node load

A: This question was in many of the developer's mind. node_load is a function which loads or constructs the node object by querying the database. This function uses static variable so if the node object is constructed once, then from next time it will be serving the node object from the static variable (static variable life time only limited to a single page load). Now we see how to decide on node_load or querying the table, this is depends on the use case I suggest. The Answer is written with Drupal 6 in mind.

In a page if you want to list ten other titles written by the author of the node we are viewing, then go for Querying the table. This is because we only need to query a single table to get this information. Node load will be a overhead, considering there will joins with the node revision table, CCK fields table.

In other case you want to display list of node snippets (set of fields like title, teaser, date of node, configured fields etc. ) In this case we should use node_load, because node_load not only loads the node object from the database, it runs required on the node object. Some examples could be alternation in the teaser length or changing the date format etc.

Q: Do we use cache_clear_all() or clear the cache based on CID?

A: While writing code to clear the cache in our module always prefer to call Cache_clear_all by passing the CID and table name, by this only the cache content of the CID in the table will be get cleared. Or if you want to clear many rows you may use the wildcard option provided in the function.. In other case if you call cache_clear_all without CID and table, all expired cache content from cache_block and cache_page tables will get cleared (In case you have not assigned minimum cache lifetime then all temporary cache will get deleted). If you are storing the cache in other tables it is required to specify the table name.

We used this concept while creating event based caching system with in our application.

Note: Use Cache_clear_all() with out arguments only if required, as if not used properly it may defeat the purpose of caching.

Q: How do we show the dynamic content when we cache?

A: When we cache the content for a lifetime 10 mins, then your user will get the static content from cache for first 10 mins. After the expiry of the lifetime 10 mins, cache will be rebuilt and new content will be shown. If you don't want your user to wait for 10 mins to get the new content, then may choose from other available option is using Ajax to load the dynamic content considering the impact.

Three Cheers to Azri & IEEE, Drupal Camp Deccan was mind blowing fun!

2011-11-11T05:49:00.000-08:00

At our Session on Performance

2011-11-11T05:47:00.000-08:00

Drupal Soup & Drupal Socks

2011-11-10T23:02:00.001-08:00

Dries lighing the lamp

2011-11-10T21:12:00.002-08:00

Acquia Team walking down to Drupal Camp Deccan

2011-11-10T21:12:00.000-08:00

Unimity @ Drupal Camp Deccan

2011-11-10T21:11:00.000-08:00

Dries Keynote at DrupalCon London

2011-08-26T01:39:00.000-07:00

Must listen to Dries Keynote at DrupalCon London. It is always great to hear him lead the Drupal Community!

He talks about Drupal and how it’s acceptance and usage has been increased. Drupal is now adopted more and more by Media, Government, Technology companies as a standard solution. He also highlights the way Drupal helps companies to innovate and move their interactions with their customers to a different level. Presents the summary of his State of Drupal 2011 survey, Drupal 8 and the way forward.

He highlights how opportunity should be the one that defines a products road map! The need for more marketing initiatives.Just jump in and watch Dries at London... I am missing being a part of it all!

Auto Complete form field with multiple Values

2011-08-14T10:44:00.000-07:00

To create an auto-complete field in Drupal, all you need to do to is to use the From API attribute #autocomplete_path and associate with a custom menu callback that provides the AJAX response for the auto-complete field. The custom menu callback can define the query that needs to be made in the database before a result is returned. The below code can b used to create a multi-select auto-complete field.

The best examples of the auto-complete field in core are the author field in node create and edit and taxonomy auto-complete.

function my_module_menu() {
$items['my-module/my-autocomplete'] = array(
'title' =>'My module autocomplete',
'page callback' => 'my_module_autocomplete',
'access callback' => 'my_access',
'access arguments' => array('my module access'),
'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,
);
return $items;
}

function my_module_autocomplete($string = '') {
$array = drupal_explode_tags($string);
// Fetch last value
$last_string = trim(array_pop($array));
$matches = array();
if ($last_string){
$result = Define Query here...
while($obj = db_fetch_object($result)) {
$prefix = count($array) ? implode(', ', $array) .', ' : '';
$matches[$prefix.$obj->;name] = check_plain($obj->name);
}
}
drupal_json($matches);
}

Reference:
1. Helper function taxonomy_autocomplete in taxonomy module
2. Function user_autocomplete in user module.

Working with Drupal’s hook_menu

2011-08-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

Drupal’s hook_menu is one of the most important drupal hook. It defines paths in the drupal system and what they do. You can not write a custom module without understanding hook_menu.

The functionality could be listing of content on the site or an administrative page or it could just be a special page that needs to be generated and maintained as a custom module, all these can be met by writing a menu callback. hook_menu is normally used in a custom module when using drupal’s page, views generated pages do not meet our custom requirements.

Often we may not want to create new menu callbacks but may use functionalities provided by other custom modules menu callbacks. There may be a need to customize the menucall backs of core or custom modules to meet the requirements.

The below note gives an overview of the different usecases of hook_menu and also a peek in to how to alter a core/contributed menu callbacks in our own custom module.
The different usecases of a hook_menu
1) Custom page or functionality on the site. e.g: Blog module’s callback blog_page that is Listing of all blogs on the site.

$items['blog'] = array(
   'title' => 'blogs',
   'description' => 'Listing of blogs.',
   'page callback' => 'blog_page',
   'access arguments' => array('access content'),
   'type' => MENU_SUGGESTED_ITEM,
);

User modules’s callback admin/user/user. This menucallback lists users, provides for links to edit and add new users

$items['admin/user/user'] = array(
   'title' => 'Users',
   'description' => 'List, add, and edit users.',
   'page callback' => 'user_admin',
   'page arguments' => array('list'),
   'access arguments' => array('administer users'),
   'file' => 'user.admin.inc',

2) Generate Forms: All forms that are built in Drupal will have an associated menu callback. Forms that need beyond the node create and edit forms that are available with Drupal need to be built using page callback drupal_get_form. These could range from admin forms to user forms. Refer Form API for more information on building forms.

e.g: Node modules: create and edit content forms.
Contact module: Site wide contact form, user contact forms and Contact admin settings forms.

$items['admin/build/contact'] = array(
   'title' => 'Contact form',
   'description' => 'Create a system contact form and set up categories for the form to use.',
   'page callback' => 'contact_admin_categories',
   'access arguments' => array('administer site-wide contact form'),
   'file' => 'contact.admin.inc',
);

3) AJAX callbacks: Any AJAX functionality on the site will have an associated callback that defines the action that happens or the value that needs to be retrieved on AJAX .

e.g: user/autocomplete AJAX callback that is called in used in the author field of the create and edit node form.

$items['user/autocomplete'] = array(
   'title' => 'User autocomplete',
   'page callback' => 'user_autocomplete',
   'access callback' => 'user_access',
   'access arguments' => array('access user profiles'),
   'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,
   'file' => 'user.pages.inc',
);

4) Create RSS feeds

The hook_menu not only allows us to define other content formats that can be generated in response to a http request.

e.g: Node/blog modules provides for rss.xml callback that provides rss feeds.

$items['rss.xml'] = array(
   'title' => 'RSS feed',
   'page callback' => 'node_feed',
   'access arguments' => array('access content'),
   'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,

For a full list of parameters that can be associated with a menucallback, visit hook_menu drupal 6 api page. Most importantly, in all the above the menu callback created can be associated with specific permissions. The access arguments help in defining the access rules and also in providing security to the menu callbacks.

Proper use of these parameters is important in implementing the functionality and also in organising the associated code.

Customizing core/contributed module’s menucallbacks
Some usecases include:

1. Rename the path of a core or contributed module. This can be achieved using: path_set_alias.
path_set_alias('og/xxx/'. $node->nid, $alias_path);
This is particularly useful for modules that are not supported by pathauto.Path auto module provides for an admin interface to path alias various content in Drupal.

2. Reset some of the menucallback's properties by using Hook Menu Alter.

Removing user profile tabs using menu_alter
function my_module_menu_alter(&$items) {
$items['user/...']['type'] = MENU_CALLBACK;
}In the above example we are changing the type of Menu callback user/... from MENU_LOCAL_TASK to a regular MENU_CALLBACK. This callback will no longer be displayed in a tab.

menu_alter could be extended to change the access callback, redirect to another custom callback, etc.
function my_module_menu_alter(&$items) {
$items['cart']['access arguments'] = array('access my module'); $items['cart']['page callback'] = 'drupal_goto'; $items['cart']['page arguments'] = array('my_module_menu');
}In the above example we reset the access arguments of the ‘cart’ callback in ubercart module to my modules permission 'access my module', redirect the cart callback to my modules callback my_module_menu.

References:

hook_menu api reference:

http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/developer--hooks--core.php/function/hook_menu/6

hook_menu_alter:

http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/developer--hooks--core.php/function/hook_menu_alter/6

Drupal's Menu System:

http://drupal.org/node/102338

Drupal and Mobile Apps

2011-07-31T10:46:00.000-07:00

Today having a website is synonymous to being accessible in all devices. Drupal is being used as the backend Data store for a large number of Mobile Apps. Mobile Apps could be Iphone Apps, Anroid Apps or specifically for Blackberry.

The two modules that are being widely used in building Drupal based Mobile Apps are Services and View Data Source modules.

Services Modules

Services Module allows you to expose drupal data to external websites or Mobile applications. Earlier Services was used to integrate Flash with Drupal, today most of the use cases of Services module are for Mobile Apps, where Drupal acts as the backend. The power of services module is that it has multiple interfaces and hence brings with greater flexibility. The Programmer can focus on handling the content while Service takes care of the json response in appropriate format.

The Main components of the Services module are:

Servers: That Receive and Send requests
Authentication Layer
Services: These Process data that need to be pulled out of the Drupal backend

Link to Module Page: http://drupal.org/project/services

Views Data Source

This module allows you to render out put from various views in a variety of formats. The Module is extremely simple to use: Create a view as required, choose page display and one of the Views Data Source formats.

Link to Module page: http://drupal.org/project/views_datasource

Reference links:

http://www.lullabot.com/podcasts/drupal-voices-105-greg-dunlap-on-services-module-and-mobile-apps
http://www.lullabot.com/podcasts/drupal-voices-208-pat-teglia-on-developing-mobile-apps-with-titanium-framework
http://www.lullabot.com/articles/module-monday-views-datasource
http://chicago2011.drupal.org/conference/bof/mobile-apps-use-drupal-backend-w-services-modules-nysenate
http://groups.drupal.org/mobile

Interesting Facts on Drupal Module Development

2011-03-06T05:52:00.000-08:00

I am reading Drupal 7 Module Development by

Matt Butcher, Greg Dunlap, Matt Farnia, Larry Garfield, Ken Rickard and Jon Albin Wilkins.

Inspired by the book, some Interesting Facts on Drupal Module Development that I wanted to share

What is the hook implementation in Drupal?
EVENT Triggers in drupal: The Hook implementation is a function that follows a certain naming pattern in order to indicatie to Drupal that it should be used as a callback for a particular event in the Drupal System.

In most cases ensure the hook implementations reside within the main .module file.

Placing your Custom modules:
OPTION1: The convention that we follow is to place both Contributed and Custom modules under sites/all/modules directory. All the custom modules are placed with in sites/all/modules/custom.

OPTION2: The second approach could be to have all Contributed modules under
sites/all/modules/contrib and any Custom modules under sites/all/modules/custom. This may not be a good solution as in Drupal 7 when you use Drush, the modules are automatically installed under sites/all/modules.

OPTION3: The approach I read in the book seems really neat. Place all Contrib modules under sites/all/modules and all custom modules under sites/default/modules.
The main advantage being, it brings a clear separation between the modules maintained by us and those by the community.

But in the case of a multisite installation where there is a need to share the custom modules across installations choose OPTION1

The .info file in any module always starts with a $Id$. Have you wondered why?
This is a placeholder for the Version control system to store information about the file. ( When the file was last checked in and by who)
With the new GIT integration alive, this should be on the way out.
Follow Doxygen-style commenting (/** */)
@file decorator for doc-block should be the first doc block of any module
Syntax: Begin with a single sentence Description of the module, followed by a blank line and then followed by a one or more paragraph description of the module.
ALL DOCS MUST BE WRITTEN IN GRAMATICALLY CORRECT AND PUNCTUATED SENTENCES.
$variable = ‘This is a string’ ;
t($variable) ;

Why wouldn’t translation system work above?

Automated Translation run, the code doesnot execute it only simply reads.
Once a module is installed, Drupal caches the content of the .info file. Revisit the module page to force Durpal to refresh this information.
Drupal arrays - terminate large multiline arrays with a comma: This is to help in avoiding syntax errors while adding or removing from a large array.
This can not be extended to drupal js arrays.
2 Most powerful Enhancements in Drupal 7

PDI – PHP Data Object library integration in Durpal 7: This library is an abstraction layer that supports numerous database layer. This provides the capability for Drupal 7 to support beyond MYsql. Postgre-sql to Oracle and
Fields and Entities

i. Field system: Bring with it CCKs functionality in the core

ii. Entity System: make sit possible to define structures data types that are not NODES!

Attending DrupalCon Chicago!

2011-03-04T20:21:00.000-08:00

I have been working on Drupal projects for over 4 years now. Some high performance sites, some Durpal Applications and some others Content sites. I could talk about my Drupal experience professionally, about the features we implemented, the theming we did, the modules we developed, the performance tuning, etc. But now when I sit back now on my Flight to Newark and think about it, the most exciting part has been the Drupal Community!

When I retrospect about what I have been doing and why? What is it that has made me stick on to Drupal, work with Drupal and here fly across the world for a Drupal conference? The Answers are far beyond the challenges that I faced on a day to day basis or the bugs that I fixed in my projects or the technology I learnt. It is MUCH more than all this. It is my sense of belonging, being a part of this big community, sharing the success and the joys. The Feeling of Oneness!

In this respect I think the Drupal Community has made my experience in the last few years richer and just being a part of this one big community has given more joy.

I do not write modules, but I love participating in the Drupal Forums. I am very active in the Forums, most of the timesJ. Over the last year I was involved in QA of the Drupal redesign and early this year in bringing us all together for the Drupal 7 celebrations. I have also been very active in bringing together the Chennai Drupal Community.

The Chennai Drupal Community has been an exciting experience. Here our interactions have gone beyond the internet. We have regular face to face meetings with each other and share our experiences and knowledge in Drupal. The energy we share is humongous. I have also got a chance to present at many big conferences in

India

and to conduct Drupal Introductory training programs at Colleges.

Today, I am looking forward to meeting many fellow Drupaler across the world, who I have actively followed and some of whom I have interacted with! I am excited I will be meeting them face to face… Looking forward to meeting the Drupal Community.

We must have one DrupalCon in India every year, so all my colleagues, other Drupalers in India can share this experience…

A Very Happy New Year with Drupal!

2010-12-27T08:48:00.000-08:00

Drupal Christmas Song, Listen and enjoy the Season with Drupal!

Local Drupal Fun this NewYear:

Enjoy Drupaling this New Year. Join us at Drupal 7 Release party, Chennai. There is going to be a whole lot of Fun! Drupal Quiz, Drupal 7 Tips and Tricks, Have Answers to Questions on how you can get involved in patch writing and reviewing, Good Food and more... Be a part of Drupal in Chennai!

Know more about Drupal 7 read on at http://shyamala-drupal.blogspot.com/search/label/Drupal%207

DrupalCon Session: Maintaining the codebase and updates of a Drupal Website

2010-12-17T08:58:00.000-08:00

Drupal stores most of the configurations and settings in the database. Deploying and Managing a Drupal website requires both code updates as well as interface updates. Changing permissions, adding fields to your content types, modify an existing view, installing and configuring a new module are some of the typical interface updates that needs to be moved from the Development Server to the Test servers and then further in the Live servers. In this session I would like to present solutions that would facilitate the update process to be people independent and totally maintained under version control.

Want to Checkout solutions to ease the maintenance of a Drupal Website VOTE FOR my DrupalCon Session at http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/maintaining-codebase-and-updates-drupal-website

Questions answered by this session would include:

How to have a Drupal update process that is people independent and totally maintained under version control?

Question 2:

How to use Drush to improve the Update Deployment Process for a Drupal website?

What are Features and Strongram modules?

How to use update.php to trigger database script updates? What are the cache flush routines that need to be called after the database updates?

What are status of Drush, Features modules in Drupal 7?

Drupal Workshop for Academicians and Researchers at NCAR

2010-12-17T06:58:00.000-08:00

It was indeed a unique experience presenting and conducting a Workshop on Drupal to a group of Academicians and Researchers. The Workshop was organised by Free Software Movement of India at NCAR Hyderabad, India. It gives me great pride that I participated in a Workshop that was inaugurated by Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam.

Siva from Drupal Hyderbad and I conducted this Workshop together. We only met in the morning, but we were so much in Synch and Conducted the workshop as though we had always worked together! Wondering what brought this togetherness, it was ofcourse the fact that both of us were Drupalers! Drupal brought us together.

Both Siva and I had short Presentations and we also helped our participants have a handson on Drupal, trying out a Drupal installation from scratch, changing the theme, enabling modules and actually feeling the power of Drupal.

My Presentation

Drupal for Academics and Research

View more presentations from rajaram shyamala.

The most exiting part of these Workshops are always the Question Answer Sessions. Some of the interesting Questions were:

How can Drupal help Academicians and Researchers?

How is Drupal different from Moodle?

How can I change the look and feel of my Drupal site?

How do you install new modules?

Drupal's Installation Profiles

2010-11-25T08:37:00.000-08:00

What is a Drupal installation Profile?

It is a set of Drupal modules, predefined themes, configurations bundled together into a single installation. When you install this bundled installation, all the modules in it will get installed, preconfigured and you have a ready to use Drupal website. These installation profiles could cater to specific requirements that Drupal could be used to meet, like a Newspaper website, a Wiki Website, an Intranet portal, etc. Check out Drupal Installation profiles at http://drupal.org/project/installation%2Bprofiles

Components of a Drupal Installation Profile

Install profiles are located in the 'profiles' directory of a core Drupal installation. They are named profilename.profile. A profile will contain the below set of Functions:

profilename_profile_modules() - This function defines all the modules that get installed with the profile. First the Core modules are installed, followed by Contributed, followed by Custom modules.

profilename_profile_details() - This function defines the name and a short description of the Profile. The Default profile is the Drupal profile that comes with every Drupal installation.

profilename_profile_tasks() - At this stage the modules specified in profilename_profile_modules() have been installed. And you have access to the full Drupal API so you could define any custom content types, create vocabularies and terms, change variable settings to your liking, etc

We could have database updates like:

1) Set configurations (variable_set)
2) Create predefines roles and access control
3) Create preconfigured Menus
4) Create preconfigured Blocks and CCK
5) Create preconfigured content or content types
6) Configure predefine theme

This should be followed with Cache clear and Database rebuild.

1. Rebuild menu
2. Clear Cache: run cron to clear cache or write explicit cache clear code as in the systems.module in Drupal core
DONOT use drupal_flush_all_caches(): would result in all themes being disabled
3. Based on the contributed modules enabled, we must also make sure and handle any other table that requires a rebuild following their installation.

Reference: Writing a Drupal installation Profile Handbook Page

Supporter modules:
Installation Profile API
Profile Generator

Why Create Drupal Profiles?

Drupal Profiles provide a easy maintainable suite that can be replicated for multiple users. The readily available Installation Profiles in Drupal allow a quick and easy base website.

Some Good Installation Profiles:
Drupal Commons Maintained by Acquia: This Profile provides social business software providing organizations with a complete solution for forming collaborative communities.

Open Publish: a packaged distribution of the popular open source social publishing platform, Drupal, that has been tailored to the needs of today's online publishers and Newspaper companies.

Related Links:
http://www.lullabot.com/articles/5-step-drupal-distributions
http://www.lullabot.com/podcasts/lullabot-podcast-75-drupal-distributions-and-features
http://buytaert.net/drupal-distributions
Business models around installation profiles: http://buytaert.net/on-business-models-for-drupal-distributions

Acquia partner ship programs around Drupal distributions: http://acquia.com/blog/drupal-software-publishing

Architecting a solution in Drupal

2010-11-23T20:32:00.000-08:00

Architecting a solution in Drupal is not always straight forward. The main parameters that are key to a well Architected solution in Drupal are:

1. Understanding of Drupal
2. Maintainability
3. Performance
4. Working with Open source

Understanding Drupal's architecture and functionality is a key in architecting a solution in Drupal. I guess to leverage any technology a deep understanding of how the technology functions is must to use it optimally.

Main aspects of Maintainability

1. Use of well maintained modules and Plugins
2. Minimize configuration and move as much to code as possible, anything in code can be version controlled
3. Custom modules should be simplified elements, in sink with Drupals architecture
- Identifying the configuration parameters
- Use of Drupal Hooks and Drupal functionality
- Separating the Theme and the coding Layer
- Following Drupal's coding standards

The result of a well written and maintainable code should be that any Drupal programmer can pick up the module and start working with it.

Main aspects of Performance are

1. Database design:
2. Optimizing the Queries
3. Building of custom caching layer or efficient use of Drupal's Caching mechanism
4. Using appropriate technologies to make do for mysql's deficiencies - like using Apache Solr for Search
5. Server side Performance enhancements

Working with Open source

Need to be able to leverage the community to give and find solutions.
You have an opportunity to learn from the solutions used by similar interested communities and their real time experience, which could also play a role in the architecture of your solution.

A Related and interesting Blog on Evaluating Drupal Modules by my colleague: read on at http://rajeev-kottayil.blogspot.com/2010/10/evaluating-drupal-modules.html

Drupal 7 and it’s Extremely friendly and Intuitive Admin interface

2010-08-25T21:32:00.000-07:00

What's in Drupal 7? Most definitely an extremely friendly and Intuitive Admin Interface!

My first impressions of Drupal 7 as Drupal Admin:

1. Extremely friendly and Intuitive Admin interface!
2. More Trendy: Extensive use of Jquery, a very interactive design
3. Navigation: Multiple Navigation points

Improved and Multiple Navigation points like:

1. Tool Bar (The Admin menu in Drupal 6)
2. Dashboard
3. Shortcuts and
4. Contextual links!
5. Admin Interface with additional TAB interface
6. Use of Overlay to display information
7. Vertical tabs in the content edit interface

Some Key Functionality in Drupal 7 core:

1. Better media handling - Image filed and Image cache is in Core
2. Custom content types in core
3. WYSIWYG Editor
4. Better Performance
5. Better tools to structure/organize content
6. Basic Views like module

Also in Core implies all these will be maintained by the Core team and be available with Drupal releases!

Reference Links:
1. Creating Drupal 7.x modules
2. Theming Drupal 6 and 7
3. Converting 6.x themes to 7.x
4. Converting 6.x modules to 7.x - Categorical
5. Menu path changes from 6.x to 7.x
6. A peek at Drupal 7 theme system changes

Contribute to Drupal

2010-02-18T08:09:00.000-08:00

Contributing to Drupal could be fun! It amazing the way Drupalers collaborate online to as much as have Drupal, Drupal's contib modules, and now the Drupal redesign. The power of Drupal, to promote Drupal!

Working in the community and all of your sudden your horizon seems extended, you are connected with people you have never met before. You are working together as though you knew each other for so long.

Being with people brings you joy. It's amazing to discover the joy of being with them online! I am thoroughly enjoying collaborating online for Drupal.

The different channels you can collaborate on:
IRC: Drupal in IRC and Firefox addon for IRC, Discussions online, Groups, Google groups.

Join and contribute, Check out: Drupal Redesign Implementers page

DRUPAL VIEWS - Important points and Optimization

2010-01-18T01:54:00.000-08:00

Drupal Views is an extremely useful Query building tool! Drupal Views brings with it a great amount of flexibility to the way existing content can be displayed on a particular website.

This article highlights some important points to remember before creating a Drupal View. The concepts are explained with respect to a News paper site as example.

The Basic elements of a Drupal Views include:

Base Tables - Node tables, Comment tables, user tables, etc.
Fields - information that gets displayed
Filters - the criteria based on which the information is querried
Sort criteria - the criteria based on which the content is sorted and displayed.
Arguments - variable filters that can be changed dynamically when the view is constructed.
'Relationship - integrating with custom tables

POINTS to remember:

Reuse Views and use FILTERS as ARGUMENTS - Using Filters as Arguments lets the view display contextual content. In a Newspaper site the same view can be used multiple times for various taxonomies, taxonomy being an argument. The BLOB size of the VIEWS TABLE is very large, reducing the number of views helps in maintainability and in Performance by reducing the View table size. A couple of use cases of Arguments in Views for a Newspaper site:

In the home page of a Newspaper a Single view with multiple sub channels - a single view can be used, the result obtained by passing the corresponding sub channel taxonomy can be displayed sequentially.
In an Article page, the article tags can be passed as arguments to the same view to display related content based on that particular article.

Typical filters to include are

NODE type == Published,
Node Article Type,
Node Created date.

Always define what should happen if a view returns a 'Null value'. Typically define a message/page it should take you to and display a specific message.
While defining Arguments, define what should happen if there were no arguments passed to the view. This could be 'All values' or a Page not found, etc.
UNDERSTANDING the query associated with a VIEW: In Drupal 6 you can Preview a VIEW while you are still building it. In Drupal it's so easy to construct a view and most of the time take it for granted. Below are some key points that will help you understand the View Query and give some pointers as to what to look for.

Pager Query - In this case there are 2 Queries that run - one to count the total number of records and build the pager, second the Query to obtain the first set of records for that page.
For a block/ page view with a count or limit there is only one Query.
Based on the fields displayed, the filters selected and the sort criteria defined, the JOINS in the Query will be constructed. Some examples:

If the filter is CCK field there will be a INNERJOIN to the corresponding CCK table

SELECT node.nid AS nid,node.title AS node_title,

 node_data_field_article_date.field_article_date_value AS node_data_field_article_date_field_article_date_value,

 node.sticky AS node_sticky,   node_weight.sticky AS node_weight_sticky

 FROM node node

 LEFT JOIN term_node term_node ON node.vid = term_node.vid

 LEFT JOIN content_field_article_date node_data_field_article_date ON node.vid = node_data_field_article_date.vid

 LEFT JOIN node node_weight ON node.nid = node_weight.nid

 WHERE (node.type = 'article') AND (node.status <> 0) AND (term_node.tid = 4)

 ORDER BY node_data_field_article_date_field_article_date_value DESC, node_sticky ASC, node_weight_sticky DESC

For a SORT criteria as most commented the INNERJOIN to the comment stats realted table

SELECT node.nid AS nid, node.title AS node_title,

 node_comment_statistics.comment_count AS    node_comment_statistics_comment_count

 FROM node node

 INNER JOIN node_comment_statistics node_comment_statistics ON node.nid = node_comment_statistics.nid

 WHERE (node.type in ('article')) AND (node_comment_statistics.comment_count > 0) AND (node.status <> 0)

 ORDER BY node_comment_statistics_comment_count DESC

OPTIMIZING the Queries:

Make sure all the fields that are used for SORTING are indexed, especially if it is a custom table.
If there is an explicit limit to the VIEW please define the same.
If a part of the VIEW cache-able , then split the VIEW into Cache-able element that is stored in a cache table and Dynamic parts as a separate view.
Use VIEWS' inbuilt time based caching mechanisms, or write custom cache code using Drupal's cache get and Cache set functions.
The Query optimization is based on which tables are Large. Typically in Drupal some of the Large tables are the Node related tables, Comment related tables, Taxonomy related table, Files related tables, User related tables. This also depends on the site and it's purpose.

EXAMPLE of a slow Query - Option 2:

In the case of a large Node table - Option 1 will take less time to execute as the 'Where' clause filters the IDs in the Node table first and then filters based on the tid, which is stored in another table.

VIEW Query Option1:

SELECT node.nid AS nid,

   node.title AS node_title,

   node_data_field_article_date.field_article_date_value AS node_data_field_article_date_field_article_date_value,

   node.sticky AS node_sticky,

   node_weight.sticky AS node_weight_sticky

 FROM node node

 LEFT JOIN term_node term_node ON node.vid = term_node.vid

 LEFT JOIN content_field_article_date node_data_field_article_date ON node.vid = node_data_field_article_date.vid

 LEFT JOIN node node_weight ON node.nid = node_weight.nid

 WHERE (node.type = 'article') AND (node.status <> 0) AND (term_node.tid = 4)

   ORDER BY node_data_field_article_date_field_article_date_value DESC, node_sticky ASC, node_weight_sticky DESC

VIEW Query Option 2:

SELECT node.nid AS nid,

   node.title AS node_title,

   node_data_field_article_date.field_article_date_value AS node_data_field_article_date_field_article_date_value,

   node.sticky AS node_sticky,

   node_weight.sticky AS node_weight_sticky

 FROM node node

 LEFT JOIN term_node term_node ON node.vid = term_node.vid

 LEFT JOIN content_field_article_date node_data_field_article_date ON node.vid = node_data_field_article_date.vid

 LEFT JOIN node node_weight ON node.nid = node_weight.nid

 WHERE (term_node.tid = 4) AND (node.type = 'article') AND (node.status <> 0)

   ORDER BY node_data_field_article_date_field_article_date_value DESC, node_sticky ASC, node_weight_sticky DESC

Other Resources on Views

VIEWS Handbook page: http://drupal.org/node/109604
VIEWS useful links: http://www.lullabot.com/articles/hacking-views-part-1-basic-concepts
VIEWS 2 - Building Views with Fivestar and Voting API modules: http://www.lullabot.com/videocast/building-views-fivestar-and-votingapi

An Introduction to Drupal

2010-01-09T17:32:00.000-08:00

An Introduction to Drupal - presented to students from engineering colleges at Free Software Foundation, Tamil Nadu meet at IFMR, Chennai. I was so excited to present Drupal to a bunch of FSF students, who where involved in presenting various Free softwares they were working on. I followed my presentation with a short Demo of installing Drupal.

Presentation path

History of Drupal
Principles of Drupal
Drupal’s structure
Key terminologies in Drupal
Trends in Portals – Web 2.0 & Web 3.0
Showcase websites in Drupal

Introduction To Drupal

View more presentations from rajaram shyamala.

Drupal as an open source platform and its relevance to the Librarians

2009-12-29T08:31:00.000-08:00

Abstract:

The focus would be to provide an overview and introduction to the key principles of Drupal as an open source platform and its relevance to the Librarians in terms of creating the next level of knowledge sharing and management options.

The main points that I will cover are:

(i) An introduction to Drupal as an Open Source Solution & Content Management System.
The role Drupal can play in building a strong, intuitive and user friendly interfaces

(ii) Drupal's relevance to Librarians and Library management in today’s context of Semantic web.

(iii) Drupal's capabilities in helping Librarians reach out to their community and bring them together.

Drupal will open out the Knowledge repositories and let visitors to interact with it in new and different ways. The Libraries can then leverage the social publishing capabilities of Drupal for commenting, social tagging, personalized collections, mashups and a wide variety of other Web 2.0 features.

Drupal for Libraries

View more presentations from shyamdrupal.

Performance and Drupal

2009-08-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

As we worked towards some exciting performance gains, some of our learning

Use Drupal's Page Cache
Run Mysql tuner to understand how Mysql responds to your site
We never had in our page/panel or block a code rendered directly from a view, all our view results were cached. The lullabot article on caching, The Beginners guide to caching could be a very good starting point.
Do not panic by large no of queries, the queries with longer execution time are critical - we focused on the ones on our large tables - NODE, session, user, log, taxonomy tables
Queries with inner joins or distinct clause were also marked and reviewed
We had large benefits by restricting the log size, periodic clearing of the session tables
We did add a patch for Drupal look up path and url redirect, will have that appended to this list.
We moved from Drupal search to Google search!
USE of PHP accelerator is a must

Checkout:

Checklist for any drupal site LIST 1

2009-02-23T20:02:00.000-08:00

While creating the website:

1. List modules used
2. Do not write code in block or page, use custom module
3. Always create code for no script when using java script
4. Use Devel to understand the queries in the website a must especially for home page
5. Check Y slow performance parameters
6. Use captcha
7. SEO

a) Seo site map validate urls (make them meaningful :))
b) Add Google Analytics, to enable tracking
c) meta tag module, to add meaningful meta information
d) xml site map
e) h1 tag
f) introduce image naming convention

Pre Launch:

8. Enable HTML caching for anonymous users
9. Load test the website
10. Check error log in staging

Before Launch:

11. Install PHP accelerator
12. Configure Auto log out and session time
13. Run cron for archives
14. Schedule cron
15. Configure error log not more than a week
16. Schedule back up of database, particularly the log table
17. Admin password protect

Happy Birthday from Chennai, India!

2009-01-16T07:32:00.001-08:00

I am so excited Drupal turn's 8 Today. Happy Birthday!

You can do so much with Drupal.
I love Drupal :)

I am in love with open source again

2008-12-03T20:27:00.000-08:00

It's awesome the way people collaborate and share their views and ideas in Open source. Every one from totally different backgrounds with only Drupal as their commonality are discussing at Drupal redesign iteration 9: http://groups.drupal.org/node/17106

http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration10/homepage_notloggedin.html.

The best part of the discussion is everyone out there actually gets to read and evaluate others perspective without prejudice! To have such discussions in a real time environment with people face to face, having each one to listen to the other would be such a challenge. It's so beautiful to just watch this happen, let alone be a part of it. I just love the way we can collaborate online, I love Open source :)!

Drupal in Education:

2008-11-24T21:02:00.000-08:00

There is a need for Schools and Colleges to have a Dynamic website. This can be very easily achieved using some basic modules in Drupal

A broad list of features any educational institute would require and their associated modules / Drupal configuration.

I) Roles: ( Define using Drupal’s core access control functionality)
1. Admin
2. Teacher
3. Student
4. Visitor

II) Various Content and Content Categories - use Taxonomy to define the categories and CCK for different types of content
1. Announcements – Just another content type
2. Marketing content: - Static content
About us
Contact us
Feedback, etc.

III) Galleries – I love brilliant gallery and the effect that goes with it.

IV) Video – use video CCK with FFMpeg conversion tool, size of videos is always a problem and costs bandwidth as well. So using FFmpeg, we can configure the videos to get optimized as flash files.

V) Features for Registered users (parents/teachers/students)

1. Student id creation (bulk upload) og,
2. Class wise Home work (upload) – CCK and og
3. Class wise Events (online event registration) og - event module
4. Contact teachers – contact us page
5. Personalized Dashboards – Use views

References:

CCK:
http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/cck
http://drupal.org/project/cck
Views:
http://drupal.org/node/109604
http://drupal.org/project/views
Taxonomy:
http://drupal.org/node/299

Video and FFMpeg modules:
http://drupal.org/project/flashvideo
http://drupal.org/project/video_cck
http://drupal.org/project/emfield
Gallery:
http://drupal.org/project/brilliant_gallery
http://drupal.org/project/gallery
Organic Groups:
http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/og
http://drupal.org/project/og
Other useful modules:
http://drupal.org/project/pathauto
http://drupal.org/project/front

Some interesting articles and podcasts:

1. Using Drupal in Education, Training, and (Some) Next Steps
At: http://www.funnymonkey.com/book-training-next-steps
You can also download DrupalEd, a pre configured Drupal installation for Educational institutions.

2. Jeff Robbins talks to Bill Fitzgerald of FunnyMonkey about how Drupal is being used in universities, high schools, and other educational institutions at
http://www.lullabot.com/audiocast/podcast-66-bill-fitzgerald-education

Groups to follow:
http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-education

Multisite vs OG concept

2008-11-19T20:23:00.000-08:00

Organic Groups module

Enable users to create and manage their own 'groups'. Each group can have subscribers, and maintains a group home page where subscribers communicate amongst themselves. They do so by posting the usual node types: blog, story, page, etc. A block is shown on the group home page which facilitates these posts. The block also provides summary information about the group.

Multisite installation in drupal

Multi-site is a very powerful feature in large sites or hosting operations but is often mis-understood. Multi-site is designed as a way to share the same code base for multiple different Drupal based sites. These sites are separate and do not share content or administration. Multi-site just helps with managing the code base, shared themes and modules.

A single Drupal installation can host several Drupal-powered sites, each with its own individual configuration.

Comparison of OG and a Multi site configuration for some parameters:

Speed and Performance of individual sites
Multisite: Very good
OG: Need to cache queries to improve performance

Size of database
Multisite: No of tables in the Database incremental by the number of site specific tables. (Drupal allows for some tables to be shared across sites, hlep us configure common functionality if any.)
OG: Incremental only by an entry in the node table for each of the of content created,and an entry in the group – node access mapping table.

Managing change
Multisite:Changes in database has to be done across each of the site specific tables - This will be a challenge
OG: Easier to manage change, as all tables are shared.

The concept of OG is good for inter-related sites, when there are a lot of common functionalities across these sites.The decision of Multisite vs OG has to be based on the no of multisites that need to be created and the functionlaities across these sites.

No of sites using OG:

http://teamsugar.com
http://www.mailfriends.com
http://www.fastcompany.com
http://groups.drupal.og

Chennai meet Nov 2008

2008-11-06T02:08:00.000-08:00

Checkout the happenings at http://groups.drupal.org/node/16429. New members: Marco, Thany and Krishnakumar, bring in more energy!

Static File Servers and Drupal

2008-10-29T03:28:00.000-07:00

Any call to a Drupal site has two aspects associated with it:

The Dynamic HTML that gets created on access of the website + the static elements (like css, js and other images) that are embedded in it.

A request to the a website from a browser = Dynamic HTML call to the web server + one call each for every associated static element in the HTML to the same web server.

The amount of memory required to serve a Dynamic request is much more than that of the static file requests. More over in Apache the same memory will be utilized to serve static files as well. To avoid this we can place all static files in a separate Web server and configure the this server to handle static requests. This will greatly improve the performance and scalability of a Drupal website.

A Drupal site with lots of modules installed that handles a lot of data from the database can easily require 64M of memory per thread. This is a huge expenditure of memory compared to the 1-2M it takes to serve a static file. Since Apache recycles its worker threads, you end up in a situation where the same 64M monster that created the Drupal HTML is also used for serving a .jpg file. This is a huge waste of resources.

Refer: http://www.lullabot.com/articles/using-lighttpd-static-file-server

For a private server the needs are different. The static file become applicable for the images and css and js files associated with HTML but for the main application we need to use Private files. Private files makes the file handling process itself dynamic, where in we will require to use PHP to identify permissions and the location of the files. This is handled by a separate menu call back in Drupal. We can not use static files for this purpose.

In this case we are looking at three approaches:

1. To handle files to be placed in any physical directory (not in the root)within the same server

2. To handle files to be placed in any physical directory (not in the root) in a different server - here we are using the FTP protocol to access and place files in the file server. This is a custom code written by us.

3. To handle files to be placed in any physical directory (not in the root) in a different server - using Curl

Questions that arise - Which of these are scalable? Which is most secure?

The Semantic web and Search

2008-10-15T22:21:00.000-07:00

The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web, closer to how a user would look for information.

Achieving this would indeed awesome. Imagine the power on our searches. With all our websites having so much of information how the user could benefit from Semantic search. Dries article and what the SearchMonkey video demonstrates sums it all up! The trend in Searches today, read on ...

Here is what Dries Buytaert says about Drupal, the semantic web and search

What if instead of having a custom indexer designed just for Pivots we had a rich indexer with lots of meta information and semantic tagging.

Here is another example. Imagine a standard Drupal node-type called 'job'. The fields in the job node-type would have RDF properties associated with them mapping to salary, duration, industry, location, and so on. Creating a new job posting on a Drupal site would generate RDFa that semantic search engines like Yahoo!'s SearchMonkey would pick up and the job would be included in their world-wide job database. Read more...

SearchMonkey is Yahoo! Search's new open platform.

Using SearchMonkey, developers and site owners can use structured data to make Yahoo! Search results more useful and visually appealing, and drive more relevant traffic to their sites. Read more...

Nagarajan in Drupal Chennai

2008-10-12T08:14:00.000-07:00

I am proud to announce that my colleague Nagarajan has started a Drupal Blog. He has expert knowledge in various aspects of Drupal! For a very informative nice article on Performance improvement guidelines for Drupal sites, visit: http://nagarajan-drupal.blogspot.com/

Parameters in Apache Solr Schema.xml

2008-10-10T03:06:00.000-07:00

Indexing using Apache Solr:

In the Schema.xml we can create various datatypes. Every datatype can be associated with one and only one Analyzer. The no of Data types and the associated Analyzers define how we want to index the content. We can have one Analyzer for each of the columns in our Database!

1. The main DATA CLASSES:

1.1 Text

Class: Perdefined javaclasses to define the content datatype

Sortmissinglast = “true” (a sort on this field will cause documents
without the field to come after documents with the field )
SortMissingFirst

omitNorms= “true”
omitNorms is set to true to omit the norms associated with this field (this disables length normalization and index-time boosting for the field, and saves some memory). Only full-text fields or fields that need an index-time boost need norms.

1.2 Numeric:

class="solr.IntField" OR
class="solr.SortableIntField"

if you place a text inside a int field in the sortable type it will converted to an integer and can be sorted.

1.3 Date:

Format for date field :
1995-12-31T23:59:59Z trailing "Z" designates UTC time and is mandatory

Reference: ://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#dateTime

You can perform operations on the date field and store in the database.
NOW/HOUR
... Round to the start of the current hour
NOW-1DAY
... Exactly 1 day prior to now
NOW/DAY+6MONTHS+3DAYS
... 6 months and 3 days in the future from the start of the current day

Date Field details refer javadocs, probable use case is for time based faceted search.

3. Analyzers: Tokenizers and Tokens

If you want different columns in your database to use different Tokenizers, they must be associated with different data types in Solr. Over and above the tokenizers, the text can be further indexed using the Token filters.We an also have predefined analyzer classes in java and then just include them, they are:

BrazilianAnalyzer, ChineseAnalyzer, CJKAnalyzer, CzechAnalyzer, DutchAnalyzer, FrenchAnalyzer, GermanAnalyzer, GreekAnalyzer, KeywordAnalyzer, PatternAnalyzer, PerFieldAnalyzerWrapper, QueryAutoStopWordAnalyzer, RussianAnalyzer, ShingleAnalyzerWrapper, SimpleAnalyzer, SnowballAnalyzer, StandardAnalyzer, StopAnalyzer, ThaiAnalyzer, WhitespaceAnalyzer

Defining Custom analyzers is a combination of Tokenizers and Tokens.

2. PositionIncrementGap:

A position increment gap controls the virtual space between the last token of one field instance and the first token of the next instance. With a gap of 100, this prevents phrase queries (even with a modest slop factor) from matching across instances.

Which Tokenizer do I use? Which Token filters should I apply? How should I create my Analyzers using Tokenizers and Token filters? These questions depend on the business rule of the Search engine.

Drupal in 2001

2008-10-05T19:16:00.000-07:00

This is how Drupal looked in 2001, it was called Drop ("dorp" - village in Dutch) then!

Active Threads at Drupal Redesign

2008-09-27T20:36:00.000-07:00

Searching for Modules and Themes with certain characteristics - Imagine having all the Drupal modules tagged and we can just go to a module page, have all the related modules, tags listed!! This thread is a discussion on grouping modules and theams!!

Replace Drupal Planet and Drupal Talk with Drigg --- Didn't know about Drigg until I started following this thread! Drigg is Drupal and DIGG together!

For some one who loves Organic Groups, drupal.org projects as Organic Groups !

OG is definitely a great idea. All subscribers should get mails and notification on any updates in the issue queue, bug report or support report if subscribed too.

We should have a tab to describe the architecture of the module, the scope for future hooks or growth, this could be a wiki and we can have discussion forums around it. Group for every module saying Redesign plan for the module_name will definitely be of great use for developers to colloobrate and expand the modules. Forums must be used only to collaborate new ideas or working on a new feature, like this group? We should not under value the effectiveness of the issue queue and support request.
Click here to read more.

Another interesting thread, My vision for Drupal.org's project pages by johnforsythe@drupal.org

Join the discussion and be a part of the Drupal redesign!

Problem with Captcha for Drupal 6

2008-09-27T20:11:00.000-07:00

For all projects that we plan to launch in the next couple of months we are using Drupal 6. We had to have the registration forms live with Captcha enabled! Drupal 6 Captcha module was in development. We decided we would use it and start addressing the issues as and when we faced them. We were pretty confident as there was a working Drupal 5 version for us to compare with.

Even while we tested it, we had some problems with the Captcha not functioning on form validate. The Captcha was not refreshing because of the form cache in Drupal 6. We have temporarily resolved by clearing the cache on every form load. This should not be the ideal way to approach the problem. We must actually refresh only the Captcha element and the rest of the form must be cached. How do we define a dynamic element within a form which doesn't get cached and gets refreshed??

My colleague Nagaraj helped us resolve this issue and identify the problem.

Links:
http://drupal.org/project/captcha
http://drupal.org/node/312154

DO we really need Captcha, want to try: Safer forms!, a suggestion by Mr. Vasanth Govind.

Chennai Drupal Lunch

2008-09-16T09:47:00.000-07:00

Join us at the event http://groups.drupal.org/node/14940. Lets meet and discuss the latest happenings in Drupal.

Drupal Redesign the Drupal way!

2008-09-13T20:19:00.000-07:00

I am a BIG Fan of Drupal, not just the application, but the concept, the community, and how Drupal drives the community. Isn't all this brilliant? How can one have a Web 2.0 without experiencing it. I think this is clearly the advantage that Drupal has given me, far superior than the brilliant architecture and the wonderful piece of code. I feel extremely Proud in being a tiny part of this community. Being a part of a business organization gives me very little time, but in this little time I try and participate in the community in every possible way. I share my learnings, participate in the forums and IRC chat, create awareness and build a community of fellow drupalers in my home town, Chennai. The different avenues that Drupal uses to share with the community has helped me keep abreast and given me a feeling of belonging in the community.

Checkout and be a part of "Drupal.org redesign officially underway". Join the Group:Drupal.org redesign plan for the Drupal Association. Follow them on twitter at http://twitter.com/drupalredesign. Be a part of the exciting happening in Drupal redesign.

Drupalcon Redesign Keynote
From: markboultondesign, 5 days ago
SlideShare Link

Mashups and APIs:

2008-09-09T20:02:00.001-07:00

The Lullabot Podcast no 63 - A Very informative Podcast!

Summarizing the Podcast - the main topics covered:

1.RSS feeds and Atom Feeds ->
Is a request for a file on another server.
RSS feeds can be generated using Views and can be aggregated on a Drupal site using the Core aggregator module.

2.SOAP - Simple Object Access Protocol (services API)
and XML RPC

Ways to call a function in another server -> add a new blog post or any specific functionality in another site, programmatically interacting with other sites You connect to the server and ask for a command (method based) calling a function and you can expect a response (what you want to do?)

These are messaging protocols that can talk between webservices!

The Services module provides for these features.

A standardized solution of integrating external applications with Drupal. Service callbacks may be used with multiple interfaces like XMLRPC, SOAP, REST, AMF. This allows a Drupal site to provide web services via multiple interfaces while using the same callback code.

3. REST - noun based, object (which object, what you want to do?)

REST APIs more efficient as with REST there is no XML conversion involved. On calling a specific URL all the parameters are passed by Get request. For exchanging a large amount of info this is not good.

Ficker, Amazon provide such APIs for us to use their services. Though they open out their APIs they still do not loose their clientèle. In fact contrarily, it helps them widen their reach.

4. JASON APIs – Packets for exchanging information, array full of data. JavaScript used to access the information. No XML, easier to send back the format that can be directly used.
Google mail exchanges information in this manner.

5. AAHA ( get HTML) JavaScript running to get HTML
AJAX ( get XML) only for complex stuff!! Client side parsing of the XML and converting it to HTML

6. RDF is single resource description format. A way of storing chunks of information, like RSS or custom XML packages. Standardize information exchange using micro formats.
Protocols used - XMLRPC, Jason, …
Format of the info - RDF or RSS
RDF is a very generalized format.

7. Drupal and Mashups: How do we use these concepts in a Drupal site?

What we can do is to take data from different websites and present it on our websites, then it is called a Mashups!

8. Gmap.module is used for displaying spatial data on Google Maps.

View Demo at: http://www.chicagoancestors.org/

For more discussions on ‘The State of Geo spatial in Drupal’ join: Groups.drupal.org/node/12485

9.Amazon module, Amazon associate toolsare some modules that help us use the Amazon APIs

10. For an entire list of Mashups and integrations visit the modules repository for 3rd Party Integration. There are over 300 modules for doing these integrations.

11. A tip for module developers while creating these integrations is to provide as much access to the APIs, even if it does not have helper functions to use the same.

The Lullabots also presented a neat example of a Mashup during the Podcast:

A web page of your twitter updates that are linked to Google maps based on where you are posting the twitter update and also to your flicker under the same location as classification!

I truly enjoyed this Podcast. It was a very current and detailed podcast. Not only did it cover the technical details of Mashups and APIs but also brought in relevant examples and application into it. It brought a perspective as to where Drupal fits in the scenario as well.

Szeged 2008 Drupalcon Part I

2008-09-03T22:06:00.001-07:00

For those who where not at the Drupalcon, I have tried to list out some of the great sessions and useful resources related to search and Drupal database. For full details visit: http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/sessions

I Solr and Drupal
A presentation by Alexandru Badiu , http://www.voidberg.org

Solr is an enterprise search server based on Lucene. The presentation covers Why use Solr, the different concepts in Solr, searching in Solr, facets, geographical searching and request handlers.

solr-presentation.pdf

A presentation by Robert Douglass

robert-douglass-search_.pdf

How to get involved visit the search group at http://groups.drupal.org/node/4102

II Mysql Backup and security

A presentation by Lenz Grimmer, Sun Microsystems
mysqlBackupSecurity-DrupalCon-2008-08-28.pdf

III High Availability solutions for Mysql

A presentation by Lenz Grimmer, Sun Microsystems
Improved user experience is the need of the day! Watch Lenz address it at the DrupalCon

DrupalCon-MySQL-HA-2008-08-29.pdf

IV Drupal Databases: The Next Generation

This session takes us in to PDO (PHP Data Objects), Multiple database types at once, Improved database portability, Easier driver implementation, Database-specific optimizations, Transactions.

DBTNG_Presentation.pdf

10 Tips for a Drupal Programmer

2008-08-17T01:28:00.001-07:00

1. Use fully functional HTML_CSS files to create Drupal themes. As process have a working CSS then insert the drupal code into it.
2. Use the CMS interface features only when we need to expose an interface for the client or user to update the content.
3. Incorporate custom blocks and Views as part of code – so the code gets logged in the SVN, version control.
4. Test all code and database configurations in the Staging server before moving it to the production.
5. Follow and understand Drupal’s coding standards.
6. Using Drupal's inherent functionalities will automatically take care of many default conventions for a website. We need to be aware of these functionalities and try to understand them so that while programming we only to add to them and do not loose them.
e.g: If you use the image module, by default the alt text gets generated. We could write a custom image template, where we may forgot to add this in!
7. Giving back what we get from the community:
We get a lot from the drupal community, but how many of us give back to the community?! Some easy ways to share our learning with the Drupal community:
7.1 Get yourself a Drupal ID, visit the drupal.org home page atleast once everyday and try to respond to forum questions, just spend 10 minutes doing the same.
7.2. Subscribe for mails from drupal support at http://drupal.org/mailing-lists and try and answer atleast 5 questions a day.
8. Be current with Drupal, read the news posts at
8.1 Drupal.org
8.2 Planet Drupal
8.3 Drupal talk
8.4 Drupal dojo
8.5 Lullabot
9. Become members of drupal groups based on the projects we are working on. The groups give more current updates and happening to a drupal specific topic.
10. Be proud to be a Drupal programmer!

My first Drupal site –Tips for Non-programmers

2008-08-17T00:13:00.000-07:00

Introduction to Drupal some must read pages in the Drupal handbook:
1. Getting Started
2. The Drupal Cookbook
3. Must watch A 10 minute Drupal Demo for a small business website

Modules
1. Do not use too many modules
2. Before using a module, check issue queue. See if the module is well supported
3. Some SEO modules:
Pathauto- to rename node/234 as a more meaningful URL
Global Redirect- to redirect node/234 to its pathauto URL, avoid 2 URLs for the same content
Meta tags- to insert meta tags and key words into our site.
Do not use the google analytics module, just insert the javascript into the page.tpl

Themes
1. Choose a good theme, well supported, again
2. Small tweaks like creating a new region in the theme are simple-
just insert region in the phpengine and print the same in a div in your theme
Refer drupal handbook page on Regions in PHPTemplate
3. Remember that you can always insert content at the top and bottom of the content region using blocks, you do not have to create new regions to do the same.

Blocks
You could quickly insert a code in a block to change or fix CSS on a page. This just shows how the content we insert in a block can damage the entire layout of the site. It is always advisable to test the content of a bock in a page before adding them to the main content.

Views
Use header and footer to display links or other information that go along with the view. e.g, a View of recent posts could have a link at the footer to create a new post!

Support – some must dos:
1. Subscribe for mails from drupal support at http://drupal.org/mailing-lists and post support requests to support@drupal.org
2. Use the Forums @ www.drupal.org
3. Use IRC channel for online chat support
4. Use the issue queue of modules for module specific support

Miscellaneous sharings
1. Use Captcha on a live site, until you are confident with your Security for all comments and forms available to a visitor.
2. Never use admin, password as the admin user name and password on a live site.
3. While in production do not allow the google bot to crawl you site, update the robot.txt file in the root directory of your drupal installation to disallow bots.
4. Always test any change in a staging server before updating a live site.

Configuring MySQL - LAMP for Drupal

2008-08-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

A Benchmarking exercise for Solr search and Drupal 6 search for a search intensive website is underway. We have encountered many Mysql issues while populating the database and scaling concurrent users.

We have identified and configured most MySql parameters, we are still stuck with the slow query problem.

The Slow Query problem is more prominent in the mixed transaction Scenario. We need to identify which of the transactions is causing this problem and analyze the query.

Some of the unresolved issues in Benchmarking exercise:

- Configuring InnoDb

- Understanding all Mysql parameters

- Cause of slow queries

More about the problems faced at
http://groups.drupal.org/node/13844

Understanding Drupal – by the Lullabots

2008-08-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

I am great follower of the Lullabot team. I just went right ahead and purchased the video. The Video was a great, the timing perfect. We used the Video on a set of freshers who joined our company. It was our introductory session to the in house Drupal-training.

The content overall covered the aspects of Drupal, what is drupal and how it functions and all associated terminologies.

But for more experienced users of Drupal there was nothing much in it. It would have been nice if as a part of the video one live site was created like in the Aquia video. A little more detail on API, coding guidelines, the folder structure seemed missing. There seemed to be an over emphasis on the terminologies and less on the frame work.

Chennai Drupal Meet III

2008-08-05T09:41:00.000-07:00

Drupal meet at Chennai Again. To sign up visit: http://groups.drupal.org/node/13686

Discuss agenda at: http://groups.drupal.org/node/13737

A 10 minute Drupal Demo for a small business website

2008-07-27T08:33:00.000-07:00

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."

Theming in Drupal 6 - Key Learnings at the Lullabot workshop

2008-07-26T20:01:00.000-07:00

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)

Drupal 6 Corporate website Launched

2008-07-25T09:36:00.000-07:00

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

A very successful Chennai Drupal Meet II

2008-07-19T08:49:00.000-07:00

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!

Search and Drupal

2008-07-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-07-12T08:40:00.000-07:00

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

DRUPAL SITE PERFORMANCE

2008-07-03T06:21:00.000-07:00

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

Chennai Drupal Meet II

2008-07-02T09:35:00.000-07:00

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

Chennai Drupal Meet - My experience at the Lullabot workshop

2008-06-21T18:06:00.000-07:00

To meet all co-drupalers in Chennai was a great experience and very exciting! I shared a brief of my experiences at the Lullabot workshop at Minniapolis.

My experience at the Lullabot workshop (my ppt in text format!)

Lullabot Workshop

Drupal 6

Increased
Performance (every version of Drupal, takes care of performance aspects in the architecture)
Security
Theming made simpler
Form API is more versatile, with multi step forms and AAHA integration and support
Database (people working on oracle integration, architecture has the database handled separately)
Devel module! (Firebug -à real cool stuff)
More drag and drop, AJAX features in the user interface.
A site which is going to be launched in 3 months stick with Drupal 6, CCK Views not ready yet! (Views integration)

Theming in Drupal 6 vs Drupal 5

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!!

Lullabot Team

Most Helpful
Consulting - Help Architect a site in Drupal
Team working on different aspects of Drupal
Core
Form API
Theming
J-query and Ahah
Ahah - Asynchronous HTML and HTTP,
Security
Documentation and Training
Provide Training material
Screen casts/ Videos or Articles
Podcasts

A Drupal Project

Theming to done as a wire frame
Photo shop file
Drupal team to decide how the regions are going to be designed
Create a markup file in HTML
Then hand the mark up file to the Drupal team
New features not available to be modules
Modules back in Open Source for others to use
On completion of Project, the client must be able to maintain the same easily – Importance of Usability improvements in Drupal 6, admin interface has drag and drop/ AJAX features
Working with Open source
We must not look at proprietary code!
Put the code back into the community
The community help is fixing bugs
Improved features
You have a whole lot of new ideas

Acquia

Acquia = Drupal as Redhat = Linux
The founder is the Dries Buytaert, the original creator and project lead of the Drupal open source web content management system
A new software company that will provide value-added software products and services for the Drupal social publishing system
Carbon - commercially supported distribution of Drupal 6
Spokes - update notification service for the Carbon distribution
Caliper - spam-blocking and content monitoring network service
Yellow Jersey provides training and certification program

Sony

A big company that uses Drupal: http://www.myplay.com
A team of about 25 developers
Involved in creating custom module(that they role back into the system Drupal)
Working on upgradation and maintenance

What the workshop gave me?

How they work?
Professional
Organized
Friendly
Inspiring!!
The power of Open Source