Blog

DrupalCon Abridged

Submitted by Ariane Khachatourians on Thu, 08/27/2009 - 12:53
in

DrupalCon is about to descend on Paris in a matter of days. Sadly no, I will not be attending. But you're in luck, because our very own Disseminator of Awesome Shawn is on his way to represent Affinity Bridge and enjoy his first DrupalCon! In my absence, I thought I would write up a little DrupalCon End-User Guide of sorts, for all those first timers out there. Finding the optimal balance of geekery and socializing is key to making the most of the week, so consider these tips to lead you on the path to finding that balance.

IMG_0974.JPG

Code optimization with Xdebug and KCachegrind

Submitted by Tylor Sherman on Tue, 08/25/2009 - 11:46
in

We have been working on a migration script to move a custom CMS into Drupal, and one of the problems we have been dealing with is the script's performance. The server that it will run on kills PHP scripts that run for more than 5 minutes, and our script was running for about 20 minutes. By reducing the number of queries, making small code optimizations, and properly indexing and keying the legacy database we managed to cut the time to 10 minutes—still we were way off target. To get a better look at what was going on, we thought it would be great to install Xdebug and take a look at it with KCacheGrind. This combination of tools gives a very granular look at where time is spent in the code and should give some hints at where the bottlenecks are.

Here are my steps to get a LAMP stack, Xdebug, and KCacheGrind installed on a fresh copy of Ubuntu. This was done in a virtual machine hosted on my Mac but could be done on any Ubuntu install.

2 Weeks to Drupal 7 Code Freeze

Submitted by Ariane Khachatourians on Mon, 08/17/2009 - 14:29
in

As of today, we are now only two weeks from the Drupal 7 code freeze. When we hit Sept. 1, from then on in, only bug fixes will be worked on (no new features), as everyone focuses on generally improving the code and how it functions. Because of the deadline coming up, there is a lot of focus on getting new patches committed to HEAD before Sept. 1, and to get the patches committed, they need to be reviewed by the community and given a stamp of approval. As of 11:41am PST today, the D7 queue contains:

Drupal Aegir Project Abridged

Submitted by Ariane Khachatourians on Mon, 08/10/2009 - 16:09
in

This is the first "AB Abridged" post – a series of posts explaining the basics of some of the more ominous yet awesome Drupal projects in simple and practical terms. We hope these posts will help demystify some of these projects for people who have been hesitant to try them out!

Background

The previous version of Aegir, called Hostmaster, was developed by Adrian Rossouw (g.d.o member 1337 coincidence...?) for use at the now defunct Bryght, where they did mass Drupal hosting for several years. Its main components are the provisioning system, which manages some of the server side and back end configuration, and the hosting front end, which allows you to treat each site as a node and manage it through a Drupal interface. The hosting system also handles and allows you to watch the status of queued tasks on the server. Aegir 0.2 beta 1 Released Screenshot of the admin interface c/o Dev Seed

Patch Review Session for Drupal 7 Core

Submitted by Tylor Sherman on Fri, 07/24/2009 - 13:40
in

Last week Ariane was in on #drupal on irc.freenode.net and heard some of the core developers talking about how badly backlogged the patch review queue is. Apparently there are many good patches that haven't been reviewed and therefore haven't made it into the current release. Each of these little patches helps to make Drupal more robust and with the Drupal 7 code freeze creeping up, this is an area that needs extra help. At Affinity Bridge we have been talking about how to contribute more to Drupal core and this seemed like a good opportunity to get involved. We decided to put some of our time into helping out and realized we could use a little mentoring to get started. Ariane put the word out on Twitter and soon we had a volunteer to help us. Yesterday we were lucky enough to have Karoly Negyesi (aka chx on Drupal.org) come by and teach us about core patch reviews and the Drupal issue queue.

Syndicate content