Drupal 6.x

I have been playing with the Boost module a bit today. Boost is a nifty caching module that can vastly increase your website's performance when most of your visitors are anonymous users. So, how does Boost work? Basically, whenever an anonymous user requests a page, that page is not only delivered to the user, but also stored in a file. When a second anonymous user requests the same page again (within a given time), the webserver does not even bother to boot Drupal, but will just deliver the cached file instead.

Simmering problems are the worst and one that has been irking me for quite some time now is the utter uselessness of the "popular/today" view which comes with the Views module. Judging by it's name, you'd suspect it to reset the daily counter on midnight. Surprise! It doesn't. Worse yet, the time by which the counter gets reset advances constantly. In my case, one hour per day.

Where you ever hit by the social media? Making it to the frontpage of some large social network and getting thousands of extra visits in just a few hours is probably every bloggers dream... At least until it actually happens and the sudden traffic burst turns into a nightmare as the webserver grinds down to a halt.

In case you ever experienced this, or want to prepare for such a thing happening, I put together a few tips that should help to prevent the worst on standard LAMP type root servers.

Let's face it, Drupal's input formats are currently a mess. Directly after installation, the CMS offers "Filtered HTML" and "Full HTML", with "Filtered HTML" being the default. In theory, this works fine. Trusted users can use the entire set of tags, while untrusted users are limited to a stripped down version.

When blogging, you usually publish loose thoughts. Generally, ideas, that just came to mind and seemed interesting enough to write about at that time.
Blogging is great in the sense, that you do not need to worry a lot about structuring your content.

Let's start this with a use case. Suppose you have a client, owning an insurance company, consisting of several more or less independent departments. Let's say car insurance, life insurance, health insurance and so on. Now, that client needs a website for his intranet, so employees can efficiently communicate with each other. One important aspect of office communication is collaboration in teams. For example, the life insurance team should be able to work out a plan for a new life insurance policy without the health insurance people snooping around in their work.

There seems to be an obscure bug somewhere either in Drupal itself or in one of the modules. I haven't been able to pinpoint it's location yet, but it struck me twice already and damage repair can be utmost time consuming, especially if you do not know what you are looking for. So I guess, I'll write a how-to for it.

Dear internet,
I need to vent my anger about Drupal's organic group Module. It all started relatively harmless by noticing, that I am dealing with group owners of low discipline and little technical understanding. You know, that kind of people, who is just not aware of there being a need to do something, if the thing in question does not draw attention to itself by any other means, but showing a big red box on top of the screen, stating: "Take care of me! Yes, it is urgent and yes, you have to click here..."

Somehow, trivial problems tend to be the hardest/most time consuming ones to solve, it seems. I'm currently working on a small community website with a focus on collaboration. Among other things, this project calls for a file section, where users can exchange files. So far, thats easy. Just add a new content type, that allows for a single file to be attached and hook it up with taxonomy for navigation.
It could have ended there, but I decided to go for gold...

Ok, according to my webserver statistics, a lot of people come to my website, looking for instructions on how to use Drupal for blogging, so I decided to start writing a howto on that topic. I'm far from finished yet, but following the "publish early, publish often" mantra, it's probably enough to offer some value already.