Drupal

Acquia has announced the end of life for Mollom, the comment spam filtering service.

Mollom was created by Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen, and launched to a few beta testers (including myself) in 2007. Mollom was acquired by Acquia in 2012.

Last week, at the amazing Drupal North regional conference, I gave a talk on Backdrop: an alternative fork of Drupal. The slides from the talk are attached below, in PDF format.

Last week, Nathan Vexler of the University of Waterloo, and Khalid Baheyeldin of 2bits.com presented at the Waterloo Region Drupal Users Group on Backdrop CMS.

Backdrop CMS is a fork of Drupal, based mostly on Drupal 7.x, and mostly compatible with its API. It also has some features from Drupal 8.x. It aims to provide an alternative that reduces the cost of ownership by minimizing the learning curve for developers.

Everyone needs to have a backup plan for their live site. Not only can your server's disk get corrupted, but you can also erroneously overwrite your site with bad code or bad data, or your site can get hacked. Detecting the latter situations takes some time. Hours or days.

For this reason, you should have multiple backup copies at multiple time points.

The most convenient scheme is to have a 7 day sliding backup: that is, you have one backup snapshot for each day of the week, with today's backup overwriting the backup from 8 days ago.

Most of high traffic or complex Drupal sites use Apache Solr as the search engine. It is much faster and more scaleable than Drupal's search module.

In a previous article on Drupal with Apache Solr 4.x, we described one way to install the latest stable Apache Solr 4.x. That article detailed a lot of manual steps involving downloading, extracting, setting permissions, creating a startup script, ...etc.

Most of high traffic or complex Drupal sites use Apache Solr as the search engine. It is much faster and more scaleable than Drupal's search module.

In this article, we describe one way of many for having a working Apache Solr installation for use with Drupal 7.x, on Ubunutu Server 12.04 LTS. The technique described should work with Ubunut 14.04 LTS as well.

We previously wrote in detail about how botnets hammering a web site can cause outages.

Here is another case that emerged in the past month or so.

Again, it is a distributed attempt from many IP addresses all over the world, most probably from PCs infected with malware.

Their main goal seems to be to add content to a Drupal web site, and trying to register a new user when that attempt is denied because of site permissions.

The pattern is like the following excerpt from the web server's access log.

In the Drupal community, we always recommend using the Drupal API, and best practices for development, management and deployment. This is for many reasons, including modularity, security and maintainability.

But it is also for performance that you need to stick to these guidelines, refined for many years by so many in the community.