DRUPAL CON REVIEW

Presented by:

Akilah Jackson, Office of Information Technology

Megan Weng, Arts and Humanities

What is Drupal Con?

The bi-annual conference about Drupal

Previously held in major cities all over the world, including D.C and Paris last year

This year held in San Francisco and Copenhagen (coming this fall)

Over 3,000 attendees in San Franciscohttp://sf2010.drupal.org

What is Drupal Con?

Birds of a Feather Session Tracks (64):

Welcome to Drupal (6)Design, Theme, Usability

(13)Providing Professional

Drupal Services (10)Configuration, Set-up &

Administration (7)Under the Hood (19)Leveraging Drupal for your

Business (9)http://sf2010.drupal.org

Performance 2.4 million page views per day, 60 M per month, one

server! Khalid Baheyeldin, 2bits.com Entertainment Site (over 14k nodes)

61 million page views per month14.24 million visits per months132,650 visits per hour peak539,000 visits on peak day2.4 million pages per day peakOver 70k usersAll on a single mid range server

PerformanceNumber of modules shouldn’t

matter○ Average site has 120 modules○ Consider module performance

when over 200 modulesPHP fastCGIApache fastCGIApache MPM workermemCache

Performance: Tools Jmeter – Java based load

testing tool Apache Bench – to tell how

Apache is handling serving of pages

Devel – module for admins that has more detailed performance logs (such as query execution, page loading, etc.)

Performance: Tools

YSlow for firebug (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow)

Page Speed – firebug (http://code.Google.com/speed/articles/)

Web Page Test (http://www.webpagetest.org

)

Maintenance

Drush (Drupal Shell) Dmitri Gaskin Drush as a utility for administering site

Bulk update and install modules, patchesCopy database and site installationAlias multiple sites for quick referencing

○ Good example, staging server, production server

Clear Cache

Maintenance Aegir – selection of modules

for hosting drupal sitesDrush scriptProvision scriptHosting moduleHostmaser install profileEldir theme

Nagios – module for integrating monitoring

Munin – module for integrating monitoring

Universities Case Studies in Academia:

Drupal at ASU & Johns Hopkins Knowledge for Health

Arizona State University (ASU)Centralized deployment of DrupalCampus-wide CMS

John Hopkins University (JHU)Decentralized deployment of

DrupalDrupal LMS

Short list of Universities using Drupal North Texas Duke Oregon State Michigan State University of Nevada Bradley University Stanford University University of Delaware

University of Florida University of Georgia University of Notre Dame University of Pittsburgh University of North Carolina

at Chapel Hill Virginia Tech Wake Forest University

Join Drupal in Education group

Theme Development 80% of theming steps 0 & 1

Image taken from Lullabot training 4/18/2010

Theme Development Grid Systems

CSS frameworks for building a website’s layout

Saves timeSaves moneyReduces frustration (minimize browser

compatibility issues)

Divided into columnsMost sites are 12-16 columns

Examples960OmegaBlueprint

Whitehouse.gov Drupal was specified

Provide a platform to extend Allow full control Open & transparent

Two dedicated teams + 10 agencies & vendors

Drupal 6 performance patches custom features

fault tolerance & contingency planning

Whitehouse.gov Launch in 3 months

100s of thousands of unique visitors/day1 million+ pages views/day100k+ peak concurrent live streams15k+ contact/email submissions/day

Infrastructure60+ servers for production + disaster recovering RedHat Enterprise Linux 5, MySQLPuppet, Nagio, CDN, memcache, …etcAdmin access separate from the public facing site

The Future of Drupal Drupal 7

CCK goes away becomes part of core code.○ Refashioned as Fields API

Better support for Postgres databasesBetter support for WYSIWYG editorsPopular modules should migrateMore semantic web development

Sessions to watch :Drupal 7: What you need to knowThe State of Drupal

Sessions to Reference Make Drupal Run Fast - increase page load

speed DRUSH The state of Drupal as a Web Application &

Product Platform Case Studies in Academia: Drupal at ASU &

Johns Hopkins Knowledge for Health 2.4 million page views per day, 60 M per month,

one server! Aegir Hosting System - one Drupal to rule them

all

Sessions for Reference Accelerated grid theming using

NineSixty Elevating 960gs in Drupal with the

Omega theme Providing a Scalable Infrastructure for

Whitehouse.gov

Akilah’s Takeaways The sessions are online, but the value in the conference

was the networking. Many universities are using drupal in innovative ways to

meet their campus needs (see ASU and JHU) It’s not the modules or your graphics it’s the server.

Tuning your server for optimum performance is key. The “in-crowd” communicates via IRC and Twitter

(#drupal) iPhone apps from drupal sites are gaining in popularity Drupal is venturing out into the semantic web world of

Web 3.0

Megan’s Takeaways Drupal is not only a CMS, but a platform

Things to tryModule: Features, Organic Groups, Drush (depending

availability), Quick Tab960, Omega theme

Things to look into/watch out forIntranet/Portal: Open AtriumModules: Quiz, ProjectVersion Control Systems: Subversion, Git Provisioning Systems: Aegir/PuppetNon-SQL database: Cassandra, Mongo DB