Drupal Planet

In January 2010 I attended a launch party for Drupal 7, and was real excited at the new features etc. But I started to look into upgrading my sites, and found a bunch of modules had not been ported to Drupal 7 yet. Eleven months ago, eleven months after that launch party, I posted an inventory of module readiness for upgrading my sites to Drupal 7, and still found a number were not ready, though in most cases I was feeling shy of modules marked "beta".

One of the things Drupal does is generate emails for a variety of reasons. For example new account registrations include a step to validate the account, by sending an email containing a validation link. On the large online community website I run, a long-running problem has been that the validation email does not always get delivered. This shows up as a user registration that never gets validated.

I've been hosting my Drupal sites on Dreamhost for quite awhile, but it's time to move on. They're a decent web hosting provider that offers a combination that suits me well, but if you peruse http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/ you see a lot of customers complaining bitterly about downtime and slow service. I'm one of those customers, but do not want to focus on this part of the story, and instead want to focus on seeking a proper useful home to house my websites.

This project just popped up on my radar - Canonical Entity Representation (see http://groups.drupal.org/node/197588 and http://groups.drupal.org/node/197583). The description of this sounds like it would resolve one of the key critiques I have against Drupal. Namely the lack of a import/export format that's part of Drupal Core. I'd like to call some attention to this and hopefully, as the two posts above suggests, this can be a standard part of Drupal starting with v8.

I remember attending a Drupal7 release party several months ago, 11 months ago actually. It was an exciting time, all this new stuff had gotten into core. I was hoping and looking forward to using the new functionality. But then I started evaluating the status of the contributed modules and realized it wasn't going to be possible. The main blocker at that time was that Views was in a massive rewrite mode leading to Views3, and that this was causing attendant delays in other modules who were depending on Views.

The "Path Redirect" module for Drupal 6 (http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect) is an excellent way to set up redirects from one URL to another. This module can be used for any purpose where you want the HTTP request for URL's on a Drupal website to automatically redirect to another URL. For example :-

• you might want to have a nice URL to promote for some excellent product (example.com/excellent-camera) that lands on a merchant website while hiding the complexity of the merchant URL (making sure to include the affiliate link).

Ben Buckman asked a question that struck deep into a dissatisfaction that's been growing in me about Drupal. He spoke it from the perspective of someone who's spending a lot of time inside the code, but I have a different perspective and take on it because I prefer to stay at the admin screens. He talked about the API complexity, stuff that isn't working that used to work, modules not conforming to long-standing practices, modules not using core Drupal features when arguably they should, and so forth.

I want to share the solution for a problem I (and it seems others) have had with the Drupal xmlsitemap module. The problem results in zero nodes being indexed in the sitemap which, of course, is an undesired result because the purpose of xmlsitemap is to reliably inform search engines of the nodes on your site so they can more easily index your site. Telling the search engine "I have no nodes" is a kiss of death in terms of getting traffic, that is until the search engine spiders your site and finds everything that way. But they don't spider sites every day.

Short (or tiny) URL's are great for sharing links on various social media services. Twitter's 140 character limit places a premium on bytes better used for words than URL's, e-mail clients get hinky with long URL's, and so on. It's possible to use services like tinyurl.com or bit.ly to create your short links, but as Drupal users we have a powerful platform at our fingertips. Maybe it can do the short URL natively or maybe it can be programmed to automatically retrieve short URL's from the existing services.

I have my websites hosted on Dreamhost VPS's and the other day decided to consolidate some of my sites onto one server. Using the Munin monitoring I've installed (see Use Munin to monitor a Dreamhost MySQL VPS) I could see the CPU utilization on the server was very low - below 15% - indicating that the server had CPU capacity. But a different performance issue showed up after consolidating the sites on one server. Namely the memory allocation had to be increased to 3GB when that server previously ran well at 1.2GB of memory.