Coldfront Labs

(UPDATE) I've added some new information regarding the hash value generation. Take a look.

I love open source. I really do. But one of the big complaints people have with it is documentation. Most of the time documents are written in such a way that you have to already know how to use the software to know what the docs are saying. They're more reference manuals than training or support documents. And a lot of the time this can be frustrating. With Services and making XML-RPC calls using the key authentication in Drupal, this was made more apparent than ever.

I had the opportunity to be part of a panel at the Ontario University Computing Conference titled "Exploring the Content Management Ecosystem" with some colleagues of mine. It was a great talk, really good people and great questions.

Big thanks to David Pascoe-Deslauriers (fellow Coldfront kid), Mathieu Boudreau and Bertrand Lefort for their help and opinions on the subject.

You can have a listen to the audio below.

For those who are interested, check out the 2010.oucc.ca website for more presentations and materials.

Attachment: 

Exploring the Content Management Ecosystem.mp3

On the heals of one of my previous blog posts (Making Drupal Fly) I decided to expand upon that particular server configuration. Since the time I wrote that blog post, we've changed a few things on that server since the requirements on the CMS have changed. We've got a higher load on the server than expected so we needed a way to distribute the extra database traffic across the clustered machines. As you may or may not know, Drupal is a rather database heavy application. If a lot of users are reading while a bunch are writing at once, the site can slow down quite a bit. Now I've already covered the idea of caching database queries and their results, but that doesn't help us if the queries are mostly unique or are for authenticated users (in which case, most of your caching is no longer effective).

As much as I love using Drupal, every once in a while something goes horribly, horribly wrong. Mind you, in most cases, I may have had a hand in the error (updated the wrong module, forgot a file or two, etc...) but the end result is the same; the dreaded WSOD (White Screen Of Death). These occur when PHP has some kind of error while processing your request. The problem with this is the user, unless they're technically inclined, has no idea why all they see is a big blank white screen (I'm assuming you've disabled the output of errors to the page in production. If you haven't, what are you waiting for!). Not only that, they'll just keep refreshing the page and potentially adding to your problems by having half executed PHP code running a muck on your data.

Have you ever tried to match the exact alignment your designers created for you on a web page but you're having a hard time telling if they line up? Well I was, and until just now (literally a few seconds ago I discovered this) it was a giant pain. But if you use two amazing Firefox extensions together, you can make your life a lot easier (I know it helped me).

For a while now I've been trying to figure out a good way to create a portal using Drupal. I'm looking for something similar to NetVibes or Pageflakes or iGoogle, that sort of thing. At DrupalCon DC this year Dries showed off the new Drupal.org which has such a layout. It was a beautiful drag and drop interface with dynamic tabs and all sorts of eye candy as well as functionality.
 
Alas, this interface hasn't gone live on drupal.org as of yet, nor am I certain if the code for this interface will be made public. So I've put it upon myself (and whomever would like to help me) to build this type of layout using Views, CCK, Panels and jQuery UI.
 

Recently I spent some time setting up a rather large scale deployment of Drupal. It involved a pair of blade servers with MySQL master/slave replication and a load balancer in front of them. At first it seemed like no big deal really. A pair of dedicated servers to run Drupal would serve up just about anything pretty quickly. But then things got a little interesting.

As I lay here, having just recovered from a fever of roughly 38.9 celsius (that's 102 Fahrenheit for anyone still using the imperial system) I came across an interesting tweet from @appropedia which stated:
 
   "@scriptmunkee But those would have to be tech savvy non programmers! #Drupal's a lot of work, not the best choice for simple jobs."