drupal

The Drupal Way™

The Drupal Way

I've worked with a wide variety of developers, designers, content managers, and the other Drupal users in the past few years, and I'm pretty sure I have a handle on most of the reasons people think Drupal is a horrible platform. But before I get to that, I have to set up the rest of this post with the following quote:

There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing.

Forgive me for diverging slightly into my faith, but this quote is from the late Fulton J. Sheen, and is in reference to the fact that so many people pour hatred on the Catholic Church not because of what the Church actually teaches, but because of what they think the Catholic Church teaches. Once someone comes to understand the actual teaching, they are free to agree or disagree with it—but there are comparatively few people who disagree with teachings they actually understand.

Similarly, the problems most people have with Drupal—and with systems like it—are problems not with Drupal, but with their perception of Drupal.

Java Jane: One-off vs. Flexible Design

A Java developer (let's call her Jane) is used to creating a bunch of base object classes and a schema for a database by hand, then deploying an application and managing the database through her own wrapper code. Jane is assigned to a Drupal project, takes one look at the database, and decides that no sane person would ever design a schema with hundreds of tables named field_data_* and field_revision_* for every single data point in the application!

Why does Drupal have So Many Database Tables?

In reality, Drupal is doing this because The Drupal Way dictates that things like field data should be: flexible (able to be used by different kinds of entities (content)), able to be translated, able to be revised with a trackable history, and able to be stored in different storage backends (e.g. MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, SQLite, etc.). If the fields were all stored in a per-entity table as separate columns, these different traits would be much more difficult to implement.

Thus, The Drupal Way is actually quite beneficial—if you want a flexible content management system.

I think a lot of developers hate Drupal because they know they could build a more efficient web application that only has the minimal required features they need by simply writing everything from scratch (or using a barebones framework). But what about the next 72 times you have to build the exact same thing, except slightly different each time, with a feature that's different here, translation abilities there, integration with Active Directory for user login here, integration with a dozen APIs there, etc.?

There's a maxim that goes something like: Every seasoned web developer started with plain HTML and CSS, or some hosted platform, then discovered a dynamic scripting language and built his own CMS-like system. Then, after building the CMS into a small system like many others but hopelessly insecure and unmaintainable, the developer realized that thousands of other people went through the same progression and ultimately worked together on systems like Drupal. Then said developer starts using Drupal, and the rest is history.

I know you could build a small system that beats the pants off Drupal performance-wise, and handles the three features you need done now. But why spend hours on a login form (that probably has security holes), session handling (ditto), password storage (ditto) forms in general (ditto), content CRUD interfaces, a translation system, a theme layer, etc., when you can have that out of the box, and just spend a little time making it look and behave like you want it? The shoulders of giants and all that...

.Net Neil: Letting Contrib/Bespoke Code Let You Down

A .Net developer (lets call him Neil) joins a Drupal project team after having worked on a small custom .Net application for a few years. Not only does he not know PHP (so he's learning by seeing the code already in use), he is also used to a tightly-controlled application code structure, which he knows and owns end-to-end.

Boost Expire module being deprecated; how to switch to Cache Expiration

BoostI'm a huge fan of Boost for Drupal; the module generates static HTML pages for nodes and other pages on your Drupal site so Apache can serve anonymous visitors the static pages without touching PHP or Drupal, thus allowing a normal web server (especially on cheaper shared hosting) to serve thousands instead of tens of visitors per second (or worse!).

For Drupal 7, though, Boost was rewritten and substantially simplified. This was great in that it made Boost more stable, faster, and easier to configure, but it also meant that the integrated cache expiration functionality was dumbed down and didn't really exist at all for a long time. I wrote the Boost Expire module to make it easy for sites using Boost to have the static HTML cache cleared when someone created, updated, or deleted a node or comment, among other things.

Quickly resetting a local MySQL database from the command line [Updated]

[Update: And, as quickly as I finished writing this post, I thought to myself, "surely, this would be a good thing to have drush do out-of-the-box. And... it already does, making my work on this shell script null and void. I present to you: drush sql-drop! Oh, well.]

When I'm creating or updating an installation profile/distribution for Drupal, I need to reinstall Drupal over and over again. Doing this requires a few simple steps: drop/recreate the database (or drop all db tables), then drush site-install (shortcut: si) with the proper arguments to install the site again.

In the past, I've often had Sequel Pro running in the background on my Mac, and I'd select all the database tables, right-click, choose 'Delete Tables', then have to click again on a button to confirm the deletion. This took maybe 10-20 seconds, depending on whether I already had Sequel Pro running, and how good my mouse muscles were working.

Moving Server Check.in functionality to Node.js increased per-server capacity by 100x

Just posted a new blog post to the Server Check.in blog: Moving functionality to Node.js increased per-server capacity by 100x. Here's a snippet from the post:

One feature that we just finished deploying is a small Node.js application that runs in tandem with Drupal to allow for an incredibly large number of servers and websites to be checked in a fraction of the time that we were checking them using only PHP, cron, and Drupal's Queue API.

If you need to do some potentially slow tasks very often, and they're either network or IO-bound, consider moving those tasks away from Drupal/PHP to a Node.js app. Your server and your overloaded queue will thank you!

Read more.

tl;dr Node.js is awesome for running through a large number of network or IO-bound tasks that would otherwise become burdensome at scale using Drupal's Queue API.

Giving Back - Helping with Drupal's Issue Queues

Below is a video and some notes from my presentation "Giving Back - Helping with Drupal's Issue Queues", which I gave to the St. Louis Drupal group at the April 17 meetup. Please post any feedback or additional resources/suggestions in the comments below or on YouTube.

  • Note: This presentation roughly coincides with the Drupal Ladder lesson, Getting started in the issue queue.

  • We’ll look at three different ways you can help contribute to Drupal’s success in the issue queues.

  • Cleaning up an issue queue, testing and reviewing a patch, and writing your own patch.

Clean up an issue queue

Reference: Helping maintainers in the issue queue

Real User Monitoring (RUM) with Pingdom and Drupal

Edit: There's a module for that™ now: Pingdom RUM. The information below is for historical context only. Use the module instead, since it makes this a heck of a lot simpler.


Pingdom just announced that their Real User Monitoring service is now available for all Pingdom accounts—including monitoring on one site for free accounts!

This is a great opportunity for you to start making page-specific measurements of page load performance on your Drupal site.

To get started, log into your Pingdom account (or create one, if you don't have one already), then click on the "RUM" tab. Add a site for Real User Monitoring, and then Pingdom will give you a <script> tag, which you then need to insert into the markup on your Drupal site's pages.

Shuttering isthereamoduleforthat.com

I registered isthereamoduleforthat.com on 2010-08-19 for fun—but after three years, and little traffic (besides bots and the occasional Drupal user popping over from an old link), I'm shutting down the site, and will let my domain registration expire.

Is there a module for that dot com screenshot

If someone is interested in the domain, let me know how you'd use it in the comments below, and I'll consider transferring it to you instead of letting it expire and a squatter taking over.

DrupalCon Portland is Coming Up... and Spam-Fighting News!

Druplicon at DrupalCon - balloonDrupalCon Portland is only a couple months away (early bird registration ends soon, so get your tickets if you haven't already!), and I'll be headed out that way. If this will be your first time attending a DrupalCon, be sure to read my First Timer's Guide to DrupalCon from last year.

At this year's DrupalCon, I'm excited to hear about everything going on with Drupal 8, as we're nearing the end of the development cycle, and a release candidate is on the not-too-distant horizon.

After having a baby and shying away from much Drupal contrib/core work, I finally had some time in the past few weeks to get up to speed on many of the Drupal changes that have been committed in the past month or so—and boy are they amazing (CKEditor in core, new node edit form, new responsive layouts, new admin toolbar, config, views, etc.)!

Setting a max_execution_time limit for PHP CLI

PHP's command line interface doesn't respect the max_execution_time limit within your php.ini settings. This can be both a blessing and a curse (but more often the latter). There are some drush scripts that I run concurrently for batch operations that I want to make sure don't run away from me, because they perform database operations and network calls, and can sometimes slow down and block other operations.

Memory usage - PHP and MySQL locked from runaway threads
Can you tell when the batch got backlogged? CPU usage spiked to 20, and threads went from 100 to 400.

I found that some large batch operations (where there are hundreds of thousands of items to work on) would hold the server hostage and cause a major slowdown, and when I went to the command line and ran:

$ drush @site-alias ev "print ini_get('max_execution_time');"