We are pleased to announce several Userpoints related things today.

First, we have views integration, thanks to corsix and GHOP task #62. It is available in 5.x-2.15.

A new module that helps with busy sites has been released.

This is the session expire module.

Problem

On busy sites, the number of rows in Drupal's sessions table can be really high. We saw sites with 1.7 million rows in it!

Drupal's core relies on PHP garbage collection to do this cleanup, but the options are sometimes not set correctly in php.ini, and vary from distro to distro, so the cleanup may not kick in at all. Moreover, the cleanup can be triggered by normal page views.

A new development release of Userpoints 3.x-dev is now available for download.

This version implements a new and improved API that should be more extensible in the future, and hence less disruptive for modules from one release to the next. The arguments are now minimal, with sensible defaults to those ones that are not specified. The arguments are an associative array, so addition in the future would not change the function's signature.

The fee module is designed for one time use conference/event sites. It allows conference organizers to collect fees from registered users who signed up for the conference.

Now, the module has new features that allow conference organizers to print lists of confirmed (i.e. paid up) attendees. Several fields are exposed to views, such as the gross amount, the net amount, currency, and whether the user paid or not.

2bits is a proud sponsor for the Ontario Linux Fest, which will be held in Toronto on October 13, 2007.

Khalid will be among the speakers, presenting on Web site performance optimization for large webs sites, with an emphasis on Drupal.