The kernel of my home office

Varnish is front-end web proxy that I've been using with my Drupal sites for 18 months now. I talked about it in a presentation at Drupal camp with Khalid . A front-end web proxy means that instead of visitors directly accessing the Drupal site, they go through a caching layer. I like to think of varnish as a protective bubble around Drupal. Using Varnish has a number of benefits, and in my presentation I was particularly interested in demonstrating how it enables a site to survive huge spikes of sudden traffic , beyond what a web server would normally be able to handle. So that's one of the benefits. Another important benefit is to reduce the load on the server , enabling better response. Or more cynically, it would enable you to pile more sites onto your server. But to explore this more closely: by moving most of your 'easy' page loads out of the php/apache stack, you can tune your stack better to what it's got to do - and you're not wasting 128Mb or mo...

Yes, it's that time of the year again and in classic form, Drupal Camp Toronto has come together at the relatively last minute. It probably wouldn't have happenned at all except for the support of My Planet , a new Drupal shop in Toronto with big ambitions, and Ramy Nassar to whom I owe a cheque since I'm at least helping out with sponsorship. And to complete the required promotional elements of this post, please do consider coming and look for my proposed sessions in the list. Did you know that my first post on this blog was to promote the very first Drupal Camp in Toronto? I might have even started this blog for that very purpose 5 years ago .

I've been trying to extract a domain from Namespro, a registrar. After (I hope) springing it from them, I gave them a little honest feedback. I'll provide their answer here verbatim, enough said. Okay, almost enough: I want to note that, considering the spelling mistakes, the support person who wrote this probably believed it. And for reference: my favourite registrar (hover.com) provides users the ability to generate auth codes themselves, not to have to search badly worded help systems to find the right invocation. In this case, it required a request via a hidden form, and a simple email request was ignored. After the invocation, they came back with an "are you really, really sure" reply to the ticket, which it took me a few days to notice as well. They provide no phone number to actually talk to a support person. In other words, unless you really know what you're doing and have a lot of patience, the chance of getting your domain out of Namespro is pretty slim....

Today we've launched the 2012 French for the Future National Essay Contest . The full site is someone else's, but the contest submission pages are built using CiviCRM. The essay submission pages are actually implemented as event registration pages of CiviEvent, which isn't exactly what CiviEvent is built for, but was close enough and provides some nice functionality that other alternatives (e.g. a simple CiviCRM profile) wouldn't provide. Before starting, my biggest fears were around the custom presentation bits. My first CiviCRM implementation was back in 2006, and ever since then, my standard wisdom for anyone using CiviCRM is that CiviCRM is great as a CRM, but less great in exposing itself on your website. Partly, that's because CiviCRM is CMS agnostic, so it can't use all the great tools that I'm accustomed to with Drupal (notably the forms api), but also because of the whole Smarty/QuickForm architecture, which was okay for the day, but now way be...

Drupal 7 came out in January of this year, but I've only been dipping my toes before now. I ordered the new version of Pro Drupal Development and scanned for the interesting bits, and have created four new relatively simple D7 sites so far, even including some quick themeing. But as of yesterday, I've finally started to climb the D7 learning curve, with a long delayed project to upgrade The Big Guide to Living and Working Overseas. Working Overseas is my longest running project - I started it with a custom CMS while working at a previous employer. After leaving to work on my own (that's another story) and turning entirely to Drupal, Jean-Marc found me and I've been working with him ever since. Early on, I insisted he let me convert the site to Drupal and though he wasn't convinced at the time, he's been continually delighted ever since. He appreciates all of Drupal's many fine qualities and particularly its flexibility for all the custom stuff he wants,...

I've just finished "Three Day Road" by Joseph Boyden, an appropriate novel for this time of year when death is in the air, in a "circle of life" kind of way. It's also just over 5 years since I started out working on my own, and a year since I started working again with a couple of old friends. One of those (Reema) has just found herself a real job so she'll be leaving us and I wish her well. Starting new things is usually harder and slower than I imagine, which is good, since I'd probably not bother otherwise. At the machine level: we've just brought online a new server and moved all the services left on my oldest server in preparation to shut it down. Shutting down old servers is rarely worth it from a time/finances point of view, but it seemed like the right thing to do in this case, in spite of the backlog in client work I've now accumulated. And of course, in the global scheme of things, death has the excellent function of making s...

It started off with a 5 minute presentation at a DUG-TO monthly meetup about OpenAtrium and the new Center for Social Innovation Community Site . Then Kahlid asked me to come do a real presentation at their Waterloo group. That presentation is now up here: After my presentation, Khalid said he was hoping for more details about the Features module , so when I was thinking about what I could offer to Toronto Drupal Camp, I decided on a straightforward intro/presentation . That went surprisingly well (considering that I don't usually do "straightforward" very well), and now I've ended up feeling like a Features ambassador, evidenced by the following diplomatic photo: Thanks to Chris Luckhardt Short answer: I use Features on all my new projects of any size bigger than tiny and encourage other developers to also. It's not (yet?) the holy grail, but it's definitely an essential tool for managing the ongoing development of any site. Want to know more? Check the...