drupal 7

These are my notes from a talk at Drupalcamp NYC in December 2011 by Sam Kottler, @samkottler on twitter and skottler on drupal.org.

Let's make the LAMP stack go "Vroom!" This is going to be a really high-level overview of performance.

Benchmarking vs Profiling

When we benchmark something, we're setting a baseline to compare against in the future. We want to say "it was this fast this long ago, and here's how we improved." Whereas profiling is telling what is fast and what is slow.

Apache

Has a lot of parameters you can set; I'll cover some basic ones.

by Irakli Nadareishvili, Director of Product Development at Phase2, @inadarei on Twitter.
Erik Summerfield, Software Developer at Phase2

You will probably have a number of contrib modules, and the queries that these modules execute can have a huge impact on the performance of your site.

Performance on the web is usually described by speed and scalability.

Speed is measured in seconds, and tells you how long it takes a single user to load a single page and all the assets that make up that page.

Team Based Drush

When you need to start from scratch, you can blow away what you have with drush site-install -y welcom

What did we really do here? You can also use drush si --yes welcom. Welcom is an installation profile that we created for this project. This command installs Drupal according to the install profile.

If one of my teammates needs a module, he can put it into the install profile file, commit it, and then when I get his commit I'll get the module too.

Drupal interacts with Solr through HTTP. Drupal sends content into the search index via XML documents. It walks through a node and there's a library that converts the node's attributes to XML, and Solr indexes the XML. Solr accepts documents POSTed to /update, and a different POST can be made to delete. Searching is done via GETs.

If you set up Solr locally (you need Java installed) the server will run at the same default port that is specified in the module, so by installing the module and enabling it, Solr should work out of the box.

Why Make Maps Beautiful?

Google has done amazing stuff with making maps on the web work well. But, Google Maps has become a bit like stock photography; it's not that exciting or novel anymore.

Part of why you want a map to be customized is to match the branding of your site, but maps are also a really powerful way of presenting information to people. The first thing that you do when you look at a map is to say "where am I on this map?" and see where you fit. Maps are a powerful way of presenting information, see the Pakistan Flood Response Map.

by David Strauss @DavidStrauss on Twitter

Issues we're facing

Drupal has too many overlapping configuration methods. It's confusing and not good enough for developers coming from other platforms. The code relies on configurations which could be in the database or could be in the database. You never take code from production to development and you never push your database to production.

I don't think contrib can solve this.

Terminology

by Jacob Singh and Aaron Winborn

Jacob:

Media is a module for Dupal 7. It extends the file management capabilities in core. We take the base ways that you can handle files and added enhancements. It's a framework for handling media meta-data such as authorship or quality information, as well as a consistent user interface for managing files. These are the goals of Media.

First, some definitions:

Entity

An entity is a container for bundles. Entities can contain multiple bundles. Examples of an eitity are Node, User, File, Taxonomy term, Taxonomy vocabulary.

Bundle

A bundle is a set of fields that are treated as a group by the Field API. Buncles are simillar in concept to a node type in Drupal 6. You can have a bundle that describes an article or a photo or a story, for example.

Fields

These are my notes from a talk at DrupalCamp LA 2010 given by Scott Vandehey of Metal Toad Media (@spaceninja on twitter.) I arrived a few minutes late, so the introduction is not included. Thanks to Scott for the great talk!

New Video Tag

This includes a Controls attribute, which says that when the video is shown, give the user a way to control it. It doesn't specify which controls or how they should look, which is up to the browser manufacturer.

Drupal 7 is coming, like it or not! With the upcoming release, many theme designers are anxious to know what they'll have to do to migrate their existing Drupal 6-compatible themes to make them work with Drupal 7. Here are the changes I found most interesting: