modules

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.

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.

Use These Resources

• drupalsecurityreport.org - full white paper that discusses security for Drupal; a good resource if you are a project manager
• drupal.org/writing-secure-code
• drupal.org/security/secure-configuration
• crackingdrupal.com - great book, by greggles, webchick says its the first book about drupal that she's going to buy
  heine.familiedeelstra.com
• drupal.org/project/coder - does static analysis of your code and can show you problems like SQL injection, but it doesn't catch everything.

These are my notes from Andrew Root's talk at DrupalCamp LA. Thanks to Andrew for the great talk.

Frank Febbraro is the CTO of Phase2 and the architect of the transition of whitehouse.gov to Drupal. He gave this talk at DrupalCon San Francisco.

Due to NDAs I can't go into great detail about the things I'm presenting, but I'm happy to be able to share what I can with you guys.

Overview

Whitehouse.gov scales to lots and lots of page views. Scaling means more than adding servers and increasing page views, it means planning and processes, and growing and maturing the process of delivery. We'll be talking about infrastructure, but other stuff as well.

Nick Lewis gave this talk about what's happening in Drupal's Design and Architecture at DrupalCon San Francisco 2010. You can find him on Twitter at nicklewisatx

The Kitten Methodology

When I first encountered Drupal, it was a weird box that I didn't really understand, and I just pawed at it for a little while. Now I'm a Drupal expert, and I got here by just playing around with Drupal like this.

Spy on the natives

• Understand the Drupal Culture. Get on IRC and pay attention to what the contributors are saying.

Are you looking to hire a Drupal developer? Do you know how to separate the good Drupal developers from the not-so-snazzy ones?

One of my clients asked me to put together a list of questions to ask prospective Drupal developers to assess their skill set. I came up with six that cover a good swath of the Drupal experience. Spend three minutes on each question, and you'll have a solid 20 minute interview that will tell you a lot about your prospective candidate's Drupal cred.

This is a talk moderated by Dmitri Gaskin, a 14 year old, freshman in high school. He's been doing Drupal for 4 years.

This is a Q&A session, and so go ahead and ask your questions, and either I or somebody else in the room should hopefully answer them.

Q: Apostrophes. Apparently automatic title generation interferes with apostrophes in title names. If I add an apostrophe, it doesn't appear in the database; the custom content will appear in the DB.

One of the best ways to get to know Drupal is to find the useful parts and, well, use them! Here are the most popular modules in Drupal 6, according to the stats at Drupal.org.

10. Google Analytics

I love being able to use Webform to quickly whip up a form for a client, like for a web-to-lead page or a contacts database. One customization that clients almost always request is to modify the text on Webform's confirmation page. Unfortunately the way to do this isn't immediately apparent... in fact it's kind of hidden!