frank's blog

With all of the recent hoopla we have been stirring up on our blog and in the Drupal community about the Drupal Calais modules, it is easy to lose track of all the other fantastic things we have been doing here at Phase2. Here is a quick rundown of some of our latest projects.

As Irakli already discussed, the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is an op-code pre-compiler and a cache system that can boost the performance of a PHP application up to 10 times. Op-code caches are very effective for a Drupal website, since Drupal deals with large number of source files and time spent in parsing them significantly affects performance.

However, if you don’t have XAMPP and need to install it on CentOS, you can follow this guide to get around some of the problems that happen with the default server settings.

DrupalCon 2008 Boston starts on Monday and it looks like a great lineup. Registration has just sold out at 800 attendees. After years of being a JavaOne participant, I am interested in seeing this burgeoning project’s first big conference. There is a ton of optimism building off of the release of Drupal 6, and things are setup nicely for a great experience. Here are events I plan to attend.

Have you ever been looking at a page on your Drupal site (like the login page) and wanted to remove a pesky tab (like the “Request a new password” tab), but could not figure out how to do it? Me neither, until recently. I went spelunking through the Drupal and theming core and uncovered some gems.

How frustrating is it when you are in vi and hit the backspace key and all it does is insert ^??^??^? into your text file? I have run into this problem during my conversion from XP to OS X. I do a vast majority of my work on remote Linux machines – thus am a slave to SSH. I begrudgingly admit that I love VI….except for problems like this.

Where do Chief Technical Officers come from? Are they grown on trees? Are they hatched on a CTO farm?

Many times they are grown from architects, engineers or developers. However, the CTO role can represent a drastic shift from what most production-oriented technical practitioners are prepared for or expecting. How are these growing pains best overcome?

Drupal Views are a fairly wonderful creation. They allow all kinds of usable, well….VIEWS, of your data in a Drupal site. They allow you to view your data either as a page or a block (or an RSS feed, etc), however one thing was was lacking was the ability to page content within a view block. The default view blocks provide you simply with a “more” link that will take you to the full blown page view. That was not working for us, or one of our clients and something has to give.

At Phase2, as we develop more and more Drupal Platforms (more on this another time) we wind up with many custom modules that are not contributed back to drupal.org. They are either too tied to a specific client, or something that is not ready for general consumption, or frankly, the client might see as a strategic competitive advantage. Regardless of the reason, for modules not hosted on drupal.org you lose some ability to have the wonderful update_status module provide info to your site implementations when the custom modules are out of date….or so I thought.

Amazon Web Service (AWS) are a set of services hosted by Amazon that can be used to build and host your web applications at (potentially) a fraction of the cost of traditional hosting arrangements. I wont get into all the specifics of what AWS is, you can read that here. Basically, amazon setup an enormous amount of infrastructure and have services like S3 (Simple Storage Service) for remote distributed storage and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) for resizable virtual computing (hosting).