Beautiful Drupal sites

Yes, Drupal sites can be functional AND beautiful. Even thou Drupal does miss pretty out-of-the-box templates (themes) nothing should stop skilled designer and front-end developer from making good looking websites.

It the blog 70 beautiful Drupal sites you will find the finest examples.

When implmenting new design I usually start with Zen Theme which is probably the ugliest of all but also the purest when it comes to xhtml/css base implementation. Modifying css files is usually enough to bring the website to required look.

Drupal vs. Joomla

When convincing people to use Drupal I was very often challenged with the question: why not to use Joomla instead? Till now had some problems to give professional and objective answer, one because of my devotion to Drupal, two because of my lack of experience of Joomla.
Few days ago found this post:

Drupal vs. Joomla: a frank comparison from an IBM consultant

I think it's indeed quite honest comparison of both content management systems, should quickly answer question about main pros and cons.

Drupal Case Study: Lifetime Digital

The Lifetime Digital case study highlights the proven scalability and performance of Drupal websites in a high traffic environment. By utilizing Akamai technology for caching of rich media and for anonymous users, Lifetime Digital's 6 Drupal sites have proven successful in supporting:

* 50 million page views per month
* 6.5 million site visitors per month
* 150,000 page views per hour
* load tests to levels of greater than 500,000 page views per hour

Download full Drupal Case Study: Lifetime Digital

NOTE: improvenemts in Drupal 7 care for even greater performance and scalablility!

White House website using Drupal

Did you know that from November 2009 the official White House website www.whitehouse.gov is using Drupal? This initiative is part of big open source promotion campaign and project CONNECT (an open source software solution that supports health information exchange – both locally and at the national level).

Drupal seems to be a perfect match for President Barack Obama's push for an open and transparent government -- Drupal provides a great mix of traditional web content management features and social features that enable open communication and participation. This combination is what we refer to as social publishing and is why so many people use Drupal. Furthermore, I think Drupal is a great fit in terms of President Barack Obama's desire to reduce cost and to act quickly. Drupal's flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems. In other words, Drupal is a great match for the U.S. government.

It’s a clear sign that governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software, and furthermore, that by moving away from proprietary software, they are not being locked into a particular technology, and that they can benefit from the innovation that is the result of thousands of developers collaborating on Drupal. It takes time to understand these things and to bring this change, so I congratulate the Obama administration for taking such an important leadership role in considering Open Source solutions.

Being one of the world's largest consumers of computer software, the U.S. government is not new to Drupal. Several agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education, and the General Service Administration have been using Drupal, for example. Drupal adoption is growing rapidly within the U.S. government. However, Whitehouse.gov switching to Drupal goes above and beyond any other Drupal installation within the U.S. government, and is a fantastic testament for Drupal and Open Source. It will raise awareness about Drupal across the U.S. government, and across all governments world-wide.

Upgrading

Upgrading Drupal can be pretty complex and frustrating. You can follow the official Drupal tutorials or choose for automated approach. The presentation guides you through upgrading to another major version (so for example from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6) in the automated way. It uses version control system and drush (command line shell and Unix scripting interface for Drupal).

The main tips are:

• Make backups, often (of the Drupal files and DB)
• Make frequent updates (keep modules and Drupal versions up to date)
• Order matters! (some modules have dependencies so it’s important to install the modules in right order)
• Disable contact with web (especially out coming e-mails, but also registration and user content generation)
• Clean up (remove not used modules and files)

Slides: happypixels.net/blog/upgrading-drupal

Apache Solr and state-of-the-art search techniques

Drupal's file handling capabilities keep getting better. Beyond the core upload module, the filefield module for CCK has enabled us to build sites with all sorts of files; documents, images, music, videos, and so forth. Searching within these docuements, however, has never been a common feature on Drupal sites. Some solutions have existed, particularly for extracting texts from PDFs and common wordprocessing documents. With Apache Solr, the attachments module, and an extension library called Tika, things can be much better. With Tika you can extract texts not only from Microsoft Office, Open Office, and PDF documents, you can also get text and metadata from images, songs, Flash movies and zipped archives. Searching for these texts is done as part of the normal Apache Solr driven site search.

Read more at: acquia.com/blog/use-apache-solr-search-files
Acquia Search: acquia.com/products-services/acquia-search
Slides: State-of-the-art Drupal search with Apache Solr

How to setup the perfect development environment (on Ubuntu)

Setting up a new machine to be able to do Drupal development often takes a lot of time, googling and tweaking. The presentation goes about the automated installation process which takes you up to speed in roughly 20 minutes.
The whole installation process is split up in three different steps.

• Setup Lamp Server
• Setup Drush (command line shell and Unix scripting interface for Drupal)
• Setup Eclipse (editing tool)

These steps have been automated based on a freshly installed Ubuntu 9.04. The article below gives you the code and the installation steps.

Article : Towards perfect drupal development environment
Slides PDF : krimson.be/sites/default/files/Roel_Dev_Machine.pdf
Slideshare : www.slideshare.net/krimsonbelgium