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From the early days, Drupal had the ability to embed PHP code in its content. This provides flexibility and functionality, most importantly, nodes and blocks can contain dynamically fetched data from the database using custom queries and displayed them in other content.

This is an easy approach to get such data without writing a module. All you need to do is assign the PHP input format filter to the node or block and paste your PHP code in it, and voila, you have dynamic content.

Besides its success on the desktop, Ubuntu has become a popular server distribution as well. With the release of Hardy Heron 8.04, Canonical is making this release a Long Term Support (LTS) version, with 5 years support on servers.

On Friday and Saturday May 23 and 24, 2008, both Khalid and Wafaa
attended DrupalCamp Toronto.

In addition to the Drupal for Fun and Profit talk, Khalid presented the Drupal Performance Optimization for large web sites.

The slides from the presentation are attached.

On Friday and Saturday May 23 and 24, 2008, both Khalid and Wafaa attended DrupalCamp Toronto.

In addition to the Drupal Performance Optimization for large web sites talk, Khalid presented the Drupal for Fun and Profit talk on how to make a career in Open Source. It was well received, and we hope it inspires some to take the plunge in the Drupal ecosystem, which is aptly described in the talk, with interesting pictures.

Drupal Camp Toronto 2008 is on this coming Friday and Saturday. Two days of fund, good food, geekiness, and yes, a lot of Drupalisms.

I will be presenting a session there, and having another Birds of a Feather on Performance and Scalability.

The logo is the creative work of Andrew Mallis.


Make sure you do not miss this event!

Drupal is distributed in English by default. Translations into other languages require downloading the translation, enabling the locale module and importing the translation's .po file.

Another use for the locale module is when the Drupal terminology is not suitable for the site's audience, and the site owner wants to replace end user facing text with custom versions of that. In this case, they create a locale, and change the strings they want.

At DrupalCon Boston, I met Erich Beyrent, Engineering
Manager at CommonPlaces e-Solutions. As it turns out they are using Userpoints for several large sites, including Greenopolis.com in very interesting ways.

Later, we had Erich as a guest visiting 2bits.com onsite in Waterloo, and we had this interview about Drupal, Userpoints, and other things.

In a recent article, we explained how to build memcached from source and  PHP memcache using PECL on Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10.

This article is a followup on how to configure memcache for Drupal, and how multiple bins help with performance.

Each bin in memcached correspond to one or more cache table in Drupal.

Copying a Drupal site from a live server to a test one is normally a straightforward process: you dump the database, and create a tar archive of the site, extract the archive, load the database dump, make a few changes to the settings.php file, and voila: you have a test site that mirrors the live site. You can then use this for development, training or any other purpose.