Acquia
When bad things happen to good Drupal site owners
Lately we've been having a few discussions about the various things that can go wrong with a Drupal site. We certainly see a flow of such things in the Acquia Network forum and in our support ticket system. But I'd like to throw open the doors and get a broader set of feedback.
If you have a moment, please complete the following Google Apps form. I'll gather the data and report back what I find. It should make for some interesting reading.
Nice server setup helps streamline upgrades.
Drupal's developers are constantly fixing bugs and striving to make our Drupal installations as safe as possible - there have been 6 security updates of the 5.x and 6.x branches so far in 2008. If you have several sites, the maintenance work can really cut into your time.
Migrating the Drupal way. Part II: saving those old URLs
For the second part of my migration blog, I want to touch on the importance of maintaining URLs from your old site and demonstrate some examples of how to capture them in Drupal. Search engine traffic and other referrals are invaluable when it comes to the success of a site. I've managed sites that have received upwards of 100,000 referrals a day from Google alone. This is not even to mention all of the external links and bookmarks to your pages. If you are thinking about migrating to Drupal and have not considered the importance of maintaining old URLs, you definitely should. The impact of losing that amount of traffic could be catastrophic, but luckily the solution is reasonably simple.
The Google iPhone voice app angle that no one is talking about
I checked out the new voice-activated Google Mobile App for iPhone this morning. It works pretty well - not perfect - but solid.
A hosted search service for Drupal
Jay just announced Acquia's plans to get into the hosted search business. By doing so, we hope to provide Drupal sites a (i) faster, (ii) more scalable search solution that (iii) can work across multiple sites, that (iv) can handle broader content, (v) that offers faceted navigation and more.
Hosted Solr site search for Drupal is on the way
The search technology area is highly important to people with websites. As a result, I've spent serious time looking at it. Several things have come from this time spent:
- The important thing: We'll soon be adding "hosted site search" capabilities to the Acquia Network for our subscribers. More about this below.
The S-Files: "Why can't a user edit content?"
A few days ago a user emailed with a problem about giving users the ability to edit content. The problem started with a small site that had been added to over time. Now that there were a few more pages to maintain the webmaster wanted to give access to other users to manage a few pages.
Optimizing mySQL: Temp Tables on Disk
I wrote this back in June when I was knee deep in attempting to optimize a Drupal 5 website that was receiving a lot of traffic and showing very poor performance. This article is incomplete and I don't really come up with any solid solutions here, but thought this may be of some help nonetheless.
Performance of any site is a concern when you start getting actual traffic. Drupal performance can be even trickier, as it often likes to hog up server resources especially when you have a lot of modules enabled.
The freemium business model: giving away pays
I've recently been thinking a lot about the freemium business model. For those unfamiliar with the freemium business model, it was first articulated by venture capitalist Fred Wilson in 2006:
"Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc., then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base."
The S-Files: "Help I deleted my theme"
One of the core services that Acquia offers is support for people building sites with Drupal. "The S-Files" are stories about the day-to-day life of our support team. Each one contains a nugget of Drupal knowledge that helped a customer succeed with Drupal. Enjoy!
"Hello, I installed a new theme on my site but I didn't like it. So I deleted it. Now I can't log into my site and it really looks broken."
Acquia Upgrade Team: Mission Copenhagen
Acquia documentation agent Jam* and I will be heading to Denmark this weekend where we'll be geeking out with Scandanavian Drupallers at the first ever DrupalCamp Copenhagen. You will recognize us by our Acquia shirts and our inability to speak Danish. Our mission is to help you upgrade your Drupal 4 or 5 sites to Drupal 6.
Drupal in the formative stages of adding RDF(a) for Semantic Web
There has been a lot of hand waving about the semantic web, RDF, and Drupal. This is good, and it is important for there to be excitement about the possibilities that this opens to us. Now the first concrete plans are being laid and the first patches are being written and evaluated.
Migrating the Drupal way. Part I: creating a node.
My position with Acquia will find me helping out with a lot of migrations and upgrades. I'm going to embark on a multiple-part blog to discuss some of the common techniques that I use when moving clients to Drupal.
Migrating to Drupal can seem intimidating if you already maintain a database-driven website. However, populating a Drupal site with your current content might be easier than you think. Whether you are migrating from a popular CMS or a fully custom application, you can easily use Drupal modules to mimic your current data structures and migrate your data using a simple custom PHP script. I should note that while there are several different methods to accomplish this task, this happens to be my favorite.
I work for Acquia, allow me to introduce myself
I'm still a little surprised to tell people that I work for Acquia. My fascination with Drupal started in late 2007 and quickly turned into an addiction. While building my first large project, I spent countless hours on drupal.org meeting cool people and getting advice from the Drupal community. Then in February, I found out about Acquia and kept a close eye on them as they filled up their roster with some amazing talent. At the time, I was living in Boulder, Colorado, hard at work on VeloNews.com. Acquia seemed like a dream job, but it also seemed to be a world away.
The DX Files: Static caching in Drupal
This is part four of my series, The DX Files: Improving Drupal Developer Experience. I started this series with fairly simplistic suggestions. They proved not very popular and some of them I agree were of questionable benefit due to PHP’s nature. I was pleased to discover, however, that they nevertheless had quite an impact on raising the visibility of “Developer Experience” within the Drupal community. I am therefore ready to move on to some of the more complex DX issues in Drupal.
Two more Drupal user experience studies underway
The Drupal project has been doing user experience work for several years but the pace has really picked up in 2008. This year alone we've have already completed two studies, both for Drupal 6.
Over the last week Leisa Reichelt, from Mark Boulton design has continued her user experience studies with iteration four of the redesigned Drupal.org site. In testing iteration four here's what the team from Mark Boulton design found.
Bay Area Drupalcamp 2008 - Testing party and BADCamper party
Last weekend I attended BADCamp. The camp was organized by Tao Starbow, Dan Robinson, Chris Bryant, Dmitri Gaskin, and Jen Lampton. The event was a big success and filled up to capacity with the waiting list closed weeks in advance.
Lullabot podcast #65
I was featured on the infamous Lullabot podcast series. Jeff Robbins and I talk about Acquia, Mollom and Drupal 7. Check out the Lullabot podcast #65 (mirror) if you want.
Setting up Acquia Drupal on GoDaddy Hosting
This set of screenshots grew out of a recent forum post on the Acquia Network forums. It walks through setting up a GoDaddy Linux hosting account to use Acquia Drupal. At the end of the process one has a new website. Some will scoff at the choice of GoDaddy as a hosting platform. Many shared hosts have shortcomings in different areas. Few shared hosts are going to be getting glowing recommendations on the day your site ends up on the front page of Digg, they simply aren't built for that sort of load. However, inexpensive mass-hosting environments are a place where many people get started with their website and GoDaddy is one of the popular hosts for many folks. I hope to have more similar posts soon to cover other frequently requested hosting providers. If you have suggestions of hosts you'd like to see be sure to include them in the comments.
This particular example is one that allows installing Acquia Drupal with no tools other than an unarchiver program like WinZip or the built-in handler in OS X and a web browser. If you prefer to use a program to handle FTP or like using a shell client this tutorial may be more simplified than you would like. If you'd like to get started and see what the Acquia Drupal experience is all about without any special tools then you're in the right place. All that is needed is to download Acquia Drupal and follow along.
Social software moves up in the Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technologies
Sometimes I scratch my head when I look at these lists, but this year it seems to make more sense to me. When I look at it from an Acquia and Drupal point of view, several of the items are interesting and relevant. I've provided the list below, along with my observations on how each item relates to Drupal.