Nathaniel Catchpole

During performance and scalability reviews of sites, we regularly find ourselves submitting patches to contrib modules and core to resolve performance issues. Most large Drupal installations we work with use a variation of this workflow to track patches: Upload the patch to an issue on Drupal.org if it's not already there Add the patch to a /patches folder in revision control Document what the patch does, the Drupal.org nid, and a reference to the ticket...

Jeremy Andrews

Introducing Drupal Watchdog

We're excited to have 7 members of the Tag1 Consulting team attending the DrupalCon in Chicago next week. We are all looking forward to participating in another fantastic Drupal Conference. If you've not already bought your tickets, it's still not too late ! Don't miss this one! In Chicago, Tag1 will be passing out copies of Drupal Watchdog , participating in training courses , sessions, and BoFs, and generally enjoying the two-way sharing of knowledge...

Jeremy Andrews

The Dries Issue

Drupal Watchdog Volume 1 Issue 1 is on its way to Chicago to greet all attendees of the Chicago DrupalCon . Those that subscribed should receive the first issue within the next two weeks, possibly longer for international subscribers. This issue was made possible by 23 authors, 7 editors, 2 designers, and a 3-person layout team. Its 80 pages were printed on FSC Certified paper stock with soy inks. I'll be in Chicago attending the...

Jeremy Andrews

Pleased To Announce

We are pleased to announce Drupal Watchdog as the name of our print magazine dedicated to Drupal! A lot has been happening since our previous announcement , with an impressive array of authors committing to contributing content for our premiere issue. The first issue will focus primarily on all things Drupal 7, and will cover beginner, intermediate and advanced topics. Future updates with more detail on the article content appearing in issue #1 will be...

Jeremy Andrews

Newstand Quality

We are looking to pay talented authors to contribute articles to a print Drupal magazine. Issue #1 will be distributed at the Chicago Drupalcon, and will focus on Drupal 7. The newstand-quality magazine will be a content-rich resource that aims to both introduce Drupal to a wider audience, and be an invaluable resource to existing Drupal users and developers. Additional information will be posted online soon. However, in the interests of participating in the worlwide...

Gerhard Killesreiter

Hiphop

While Drupal's performance is always of interest, it has a hard time defending itself against the features people want to add. There are different ways to address this, but the "less features" approach is usually not defensible. To defend itself from the feature onslaught, Drupal tries to load as few lines of PHP code as possible, which helps to increase performance. A PHP opcode cache (such as APC) helps even more and points the way...

Rudy Grigar

Yum!

I have created a centos/rhel Yum repository for x86_64 architectures containing all of the necessary packages for using HipHop . It depends on the EPEL and IUS repositories. All of the packages are tracked in a GitHub project , and are hosted in a Yum repository at pkg.tag1consulting.com . I recommend installing the repository and hiphop and giving it all a try. Follow the instructions provided in the README on GitHub to get started. Any...

Narayan Newton

Performance Graphing Templates
Continuing with our MongoDB monitoring series, today we are releasing Cacti Performance Graphing templates and unit tested data sources for MongoDB. These are built on top of Baron Schwartz's excellent Cacti Graph framework found here ( http://code.google.com/p/mysql-cacti-templates ). This framework allows you to define graphs via a simple (relatively) perl file and to create testable data sources for your graphs. I highly recommend it. MongoDB Cacti These Cacti Graphs, Data Templates and Data Sources allow...

Narayan Newton

No-SQL
There has been a lot of talk about No-SQL databases recently, especially in the Drupal community. One of the most popular being MongoDB, due to its easy interface, feature-full design and speed. Use of MongoDB and No-SQL in general is only going to increase in the coming months. At Tag1, we have been working on a few projects with MongoDB as a central infrastructure component. Due to this, we have come upon one of Mongo's...

Jeremy Andrews

DBA Module

I began porting the dba module to Drupal 7 as an opportunity to learn more about the new database abstraction layer. In this upcoming Drupal release, our database layer is now built upon the PHP Data Objects (PDO) data-access abstraction layer, introducing new syntax and symantecs into writing queries with Drupal. A powerful new query builder makes it possible to easily write queries that run on any database type supported by Drupal, currently including MySQL...