Lullabot

Addison Berry and Sally Young will be attending Drupal Sprint i København in Copenhagen on May 12 to participate in a core issue sprint and discuss the Learn Drupal ladder. If you're in the area, stop by and join in!

Date(s):  May 11, 2012 - 11:00pm

Florian Lorétan, one of co-leads for DrupalCon Munich, takes a moment to discuss what is happening with the upcoming conference and what people can expect. He introduces the overall theme "Open Up! Connecting Systems and People" and explains what it means, how it will tie in to the sessions, and why it's important.

This Drupal Voices was recorded at the 2012 DrupalCon in Denver.

Release Date: May 10, 2012 - 3:00pm Album: Drupal Voices Length: 5:12 minutes (3.61 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 97Kbps (vbr)

Hardware-based SSL decryption allows web servers (Apache, nginx, Varnish) to focus on serving content.

At Lullabot several of our clients have invested in powerful (but incredibly expensive) F5 Big-IP Load Balancers. One of the primary reasons for investing in an F5 is for the purpose of SSL Offloading, that is, converting external HTTPS traffic into normal HTTP traffic so that your web servers don't need to do the work themselves. HTTPS requests (and more specifically, the SSL handshaking to start the connection) is incredibly expensive, often on the magnitude of at least 10 times slower than normal HTTP requests.

In a quick, largely unscientific test, here are two Apache Bench results against a stock Apache install, one with SSL and one without. Just serving up a static text file:

ab -c 100 -n 100 http://localhost/EXAMPLE.txt
Requests per second:    611.21 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       163.609 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1.636 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          816.54 [Kbytes/sec] received

ab -c 100 -n 100 https://localhost/EXAMPLE.txt
Requests per second:    48.52 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       2060.857 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       20.609 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          64.82 [Kbytes/sec] received

Kyle Hofmeyer talks with Nathan Haug of Lullabot about Webform.com. Nathan discusses how and why the site evolved from a Drupal module into a full-blown product, as well as the unique features and benefits of this survey tool.

This Drupal Voices was recorded at the 2012 DrupalCon in Denver.

Release Date: May 9, 2012 - 10:00am Album: Drupal Voices Length: 5:58 minutes (4.14 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 97Kbps (vbr)

It's the little details about a web site that make you smile when you're finished building it: the subtle CSS effects, the way it intelligently pre-populates forms for you, the great organization of a complex content model, and the just-so text copy that makes things feel "right." That's why little details can be annoying, too. Take, for example, the names of multi-value FieldAPI fields on a Drupal content type. You can label a field 'Photos,' for example, but what if an editor only enters one? Somewhere, a copyeditor is grinding their molars over that one, but a convenient little Drupal module can save the day: Field Label Plurals.

Setting up the module is, as one might expect, pretty straightforward: turn it on, then visit an existing FieldAPI field configuration screen. You'll see a new option just below the field's normal Label: a Single-Value label. Set up both labels to match the proper pluralization rules, and the module handles the rest.

Kris Vanderwater talks about the Drupal 8 Initiative Blocks & Layouts Everywhere. Kris gives a brief overview of what this is and explains how he is working on the usability side, bringing together designers and javascript experts to ensure this will be a great experience for all users. Kris goes so far as to refer to it as "Panels in Core" and is looking for contributors, so if that strikes your fancy, take a listen to what Kris has to say.

This Drupal Voices was recorded at the 2012 DrupalCon in Denver.

Release Date: May 3, 2012 - 10:00am Album: Drupal Voices Length: 8:00 minutes (5.56 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 97Kbps (vbr)

Setting up a proper backup system is often ignored until it's too late. Manage a computer or a server for long enough, and you'll inevitably run into missing data, or worse yet, corrupted data. For small servers running on a VPS, a complete off-site backup solution might be cost prohibitive or even unavailable. Many backup systems use complicated or proprietary storage mechanisms, making recovery difficult when restoring from "bare metal". Using a combination of rsync, ssh, sudo, and a touch of bash, it's possible to back up your servers quickly and easily.

Tools Needed

• rsync
• ssh
• sudo
• cron
• A backup server to store backups with.

Plan of Attack

Using a few standard *nix tools, we're going to set up incremental off-site backups. rsync will be the core of our backup strategy. rsync is an effecient and flexible program for copying data between different systems. In essence, rsync mirrors the contents of a source directory to a destination directory. What makes rsync awesome is that it can operate very quickly even over slow network links. By default, rsync will only transfer changed files between systems, ignoring files that already exist in the destination. This means that once the initial copy is complete, subsequent rsync commands will be much faster.

Joe Shindelar joins Kyle Hofmeyer for a chat with Drew Gorton from Gorton Studios. Drew talks about NodeSquirrel, a remote backup solution for Drupal built off the Backup and Migrate module. Drew also talks about what excites him about the future of Drupal.

This Drupal Voices was recorded at the 2012 DrupalCon in Denver.

Release Date: May 1, 2012 - 10:00am Album: Drupal Voices Length: 4:07 minutes (2.85 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 96Kbps (vbr)

In a perfect world, every Drupal module would come with online documentation and support Earl Miles' Advanced Help module for in-depth instructions. In that same perfect world, ever site builder and administrator would read the INSTALL.txt and README.txt files that ship with complex modules before trying to install them. Alas, neither of those dreams is likely to become a reality anytime soon. In the meantime, there's Module Instructions -- a simple one-trick-pony that puts the contents of Readme and Install files right on Drupal's module administration page.

There's not much to say about the interface: when you visit the module administration page, Module Instructions scans each module's directory, hunting for install or readme files. if it finds them, it adds links to that module's line on the administration form. It's simple, it's effective, and while it isn't of much use on a production web site, it's a great tool to have when you're experimenting with new modules or sorting out the installed modules for an in-progress site. (The editor of Module Monday, for example, feels the acute pain of installing dozens of modules for testing purposes. Anything that consolidates their documentation is a good thing...)

Kyle Hofmeyer talks with John Albin Wilkins about the Mobile Initiative he is spearheading for Drupal 8. John discusses what this means, what's involved, and how you can help.

This Drupal Voices was recorded at the 2012 DrupalCon in Denver.

Release Date: April 24, 2012 - 4:00pm Album: Drupal Voices Length: 7:07 minutes (4.94 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 97Kbps (vbr)

Building a 'Frequently Asked Questions' page in Drupal is simple -- once you've picked the approach you want to take. Give content editors a simple 'Page' node, and hope for the best? Drop in a pre-fabricated 'FAQ' module and configure it? Add a 'FAQ Entry' content type and build a view to list them? All have been done, and all can work -- but now there's one more way to tackle the problem... FAQ Field module.

Like most FieldAPI based tools, configuring the module is simple. Just add a 'FAQ Field' to the content type of your choice, and remember to specify 'Unlimited Values' for the field. When editing nodes of that content type, content creators will be able to add any number of FAQ entries, each with its own 'Question' and 'Answer' text. The module also ships with a handful of custom formatters to display the FAQ information. The simplest lists each FAQ as a header and paragraph; the 'Accordion' style displays questions, expanding each one to display the answer when it's clicked.

Kyle Hofmeyer talks with Greg Dunlap about the Configuration Management Initiative he is spearheading for Drupal 8. Greg dives right in and discusses how, up to this point, Drupal has seriously lacked a proper method for code and development deployment. He gets into some of the nitty gritty of what he is up to and how he is solving the problem. Now that Greg has created a central API, he is looking forwarding to putting some focus on getting a proper content staging process into Drupal.

This Drupal Voices was recorded at the 2012 DrupalCon in Denver.

Release Date: April 19, 2012 - 11:00am Album: Drupal Voices Length: 6:19 minutes (4.39 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 97Kbps (vbr)

A Quick How-to

After a Drupal site launches and starts gathering content, the database can be expected to grow. If a site has commenting or node revisions enabled, the database can grow very quickly. It's not uncommon to encounter site databases that are hundreds of megabytes large, if not multiple gigabytes. Developers may need to have multiple sites set up on their local machines for quick debugging and development. With the advent of reasonably priced, but small SSDs (these days, 120GB is the sweet spot for price and size), having 20 GB of MySQL databases isn't always doable, especially when site instances are rarely used.

Take a look at the largest database you have on your local machine. Odds are, most of the content is text that is easily compressed. Developers see this every time they gzip or bzip2 a database dump and a 1GB .sql file becomes 50M. With MySQL 5.5, we can take advantage of the fact that most Drupal tables compress with very high efficiency and save previous space on our hard drives.

MySQL 5.5 offers automatic compression for InnoDB tables using the Barracuda table format. There are two requirements to be able to use compressed tables:

1. innodb_file_per_table must be enabled in my.cnf
2. The Barracuda file format must be enabled when MySQL is built.

Kyle Hofmeyer talks with Bob Kepford who discusses his newsletter, The Weekly Drop. If you're looking for a curated list of the best Drupal news delivered to your inbox every Thursday, subscribe today.

This Drupal Voices was recorded at the 2012 DrupalCon in Denver.

Release Date: April 17, 2012 - 11:00am Album: Drupal Voices Length: 1:33 minutes (1.08 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 96Kbps (vbr)

If you'll be in or near Sweden at the end of the month, Addison Berry, Lullabot's Director of Education and the Product Manager for Drupalize.Me, will be presenting a session on the Learn Drupal project at DrupalCamp Göteborg on April 28, 2012.

"Learn Drupal" focuses on getting local user groups together to work on a ladder, consisting of concise lessons, to increase your knowledge of Drupal and help make Drupal core even better. This session will explain what the Learn Drupal project is, how you and your local community can benefit from it, and show you how to get started. Get more information on the Learn Drupal project.

Addi will also be teaching a session on Intro to Drush at this event.

Date(s):  April 27, 2012 - 11:00pm

Oh, scrolling multi-select form elements. Does anyone really like them? Picking multiple items from one of these widgets often requires option-control-alt-clicking your way through a long list, hoping you don't accidentally deselect the options you've carefully chosen. Drupal's default Select Widget allows you to use convenient dropdown select menus to choose the contents of single-value fields, but if you have a multi-value field, you're out of luck. Wouldn't it be great to give content editors a list of several single-select dropdowns, rather than the unruly multi-select box? It would, and that's precisely what the Multi Selects module does.

Like many cool Drupal 7 tricks, Multiple Selects is a field editing widget that can be used with multi-value list fields like Text and number lists, as well as taxonomy term references. No configuration is necessary -- just set the field's widget to "Multiple Selects," and you're ready to go. Rather than a single scrolling multi-select box, content editors will see single-select dropdowns, with the traditional FieldAPI 'Add another item' button below.

Jeff Eaton, Joe Shindelar, Sally Young, and Kyle Hofmeyer join Jeff Robbins to discuss the latest Drupal news and look back at DrupalCon Denver.

Release Date: April 13, 2012 - 9:42am Album: Lullabot Podcast Length: 61:16 minutes (23.08 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 52Kbps (vbr)

Jeff Eaton, Joe Shindelar, Sally Young, and Kyle Hofmeyer join Jeff Robbins to discuss the latest Drupal news and look back at DrupalCon Denver.

Release Date: April 13, 2012 - 9:42am Album: Lullabot Podcast Length: 61:16 minutes (23.08 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 52Kbps (vbr)

Kyle Hofmeyer talks with Larry Garfield who is the lead on the Web Services and Context Core Initiative for Drupal 8. After the DrupalCon announcement that components from the Symfony framework are making their way into Drupal core, Larry talks about what that is, why it's happening, and the reaction from the Drupal community as a whole.

This Drupal Voices was recorded at the 2011 DrupalCon in Denver.

Release Date: April 12, 2012 - 1:00pm Album: Drupal Voices Length: 7:12 minutes (5 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 97Kbps (vbr)

Kyle Hofmeyer talks with Larry Garfield who is the lead on the Web Services and Context Core Initiative for Drupal 8. After the DrupalCon announcement that components from the Symfony framework are making their way into Drupal core, Larry talks about what that is, why it's happening, and the reaction from the Drupal community as a whole.

This Drupal Voices was recorded at the 2011 DrupalCon in Denver.

Release Date: April 12, 2012 - 1:00pm Album: Drupal Voices Length: 7:12 minutes (5 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 97Kbps (vbr)