Take the survey 2008
I just filled in A List Apart’s survey 2008 for people who make websites. It only takes about 5-10 minutes so I encourage everybody to take the survey!
This year the survey is trimmed down to 40 questions. Last year, more than 30.000 people took the survey which resulted in a massive 82 pages report which can be downloaded here. It contains a lot of nicely formatted graphs and information.
Mollom: spamfighter
Recently, we were getting more comment spam on our experimental Drupal-site diveheads.com which Akismet failed to intercept. A good reason to try out Mollom, the new spam-fighter on the block. Mollom has been around now for a couple of months and is avalaible in three popular flavors: Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla.
We expect a lot from a SaaS (Software as a Service) founded by Dries Buytaert and we already read positive reactions on other blogs. The only thing which kept us from using it before was the dreadful CAPTCHA. But the captcha is only used when Mollom is not sure if it’s SPAM or HAM (not spam), so most of the time users shouldn’t be seeing the captcha.
We are testing Mollom now on diveheads.com. This site attracts loads of spambots – about a hundred spam attempts daily according to the mollom graph beneath, which is directly available from your Drupal admin interface. That’s 574 attempts in one week since I started using Mollom, and until now not one spam attempt slipped through. Not bad, and certainly better than Akismet which I used earlier.
Mollom stats from diveheads.com
By the way: CAPTCHA stands for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’.
Where do you find new Drupal modules? You already know you can find all modules at drupal.org/project/modules or drupalmodules.com but where are the new shiny modules announced?
Also at Drupal.org of course, and to be specific, at this address:
New modules are published daily, so the RSS feed is a great way to keep an eye on interesting development.
As an alternative you might find this list at Drupalmodules also interesting:
Drupalmodules.com has great potential to provide a better service in searching for the right module but it’s not quite there yet. Each module can be rated for features, reliability, ease of use and documentation. In addition you get a list of related modules and user reviews. Many modules however, don’t have any ratings avalaible however. Or there are too few available to get a reliable picture.
Quality control and module activity?
Also it would be great if the rating system would be expanded with a bar like ‘code quality’ and a selected group of accomplished programmers would be able to rate modules for their quality of code. (efficiency, system load, number of queries etc.etc.)
And maybe a quick visual indication about the development activity. Is somebody working on a new version of a module? A very common question in the issue queue for a module which has been around a while without updates.
Google heeft zijn intrede gedaan in de virtuele werelden door Lively te lanceren.
Het aardige aan Lively is dat je virtuele kamers gemakkelijk kan embedden in je website. Zie de kamer hieronder die ik snel aangemaakt heb. Om in te loggen moet je de kleine client downloaden en een google-account hebben.
Als je trouwens net als ik de eerste keer problemen had met het joinen van een room: (er blijft beneden in beeld joining room staan maar er gebeurt verder niets) dan moet je even deze tip lezen. Dat werkte bij mij in ieder geval. Tsja het is een beta dienst nog niet lang niet vrij van bugs.
Ook is de Lively client alleen beschikbaar voor Windows XP/Vista. Toch ziet het er veelbelovend uit, simpel, mooie animaties en graphics en vooral het gemak waarmee je een kamer op je site zet geeft mogelijkheden.
Most of the time we use our own, dedicated, hosting to stay clear of potential issues like safe_mode, memory limits or maximum file uploads. Sometimes however, a client wants or needs to stay at his own hosting solutions. In that case there are some things you should be aware of when moving the site with database from your development environment to the other server.
Howto start
Assuming you have done the required research at the new hosting provider (php version? mysql version?, does the mod_rewrite module exist in Apache for clean url’s? etc.), you should start following the same steps as described for updating a Drupal site in upgrade.txt: disable all non-core modules, switch to a core theme and set the site in off-line mode.
I also recommend turning of clean-urls, turn of any performance optimization (cache, compressed css) and flushing the cache.
The moving process is easy and should pose no problems:
1. transfer all files (ftp)
2. import the mysql database at the new host (if it’s a nice hosting provider they probably have phpmyadmin installed for users somewhere.)
Also if you run into a big .sql export file for your database which is too large to handle because of the file upload limit (often set at 2Mb), try zipping the file. This will dramatically decrease it’s filesize and phpmyadmin can handle .zip files.
Configuring the new site
First of all make you should of course update the database connection settings in settings.php. Going from MySQL 4 to 5 is not a problem but you need to bew aware to use the ‘mysqli‘ protocol for MySQL 5 instead of ‘mysql‘.
Also, don’t forget to make your files directory writable again. In case safe mode is turned on you must also make a custom writable temp dir in your web dir and configure the path in admin/settings/file-system.
Don’t forget to change the cookie_name for the correct domain in settings.php. And in case it’s a multi-domain, multi-site configuration you probably need to rename the directories for the correct domain names in /sites/*. If you only have the default directory no changes are needed. More information on this topic is commented in settings.php.
Your .htaccess file should probably be fine, but you may have to set the correct RewriteBase depending on the hosting environment. Read the comments in the .htaccess file and this page for more information. By the way: while you’re in the .htaccess file you may want to uncomment the www. prefix redirect.
Broken css? If you turn on clean urls (by running the test) and encouter a slow loading site with no style sheets, you need to set the correct $base_url in settings.php.
Memory limit issues
One problem you could encounter after a succesfull move is lack of sufficient memory on the server. This php.ini setting (memory_limit) can be anything but is most likely to be a number between 10 and 30mb. Yo can find this setting in a phpinfo() dump. And although you can sometimes override this setting in your .htaccess – most of the time you can’t because the hosting provider simply does not allow it.
So if you are getting a fatal error message like “Allowed memory size of X bytes exhausted (tried to allocate Y bytes)” you should probably rethink your modules.
On a 20 mb limit site, I occasionally got this error. This site was using some heavy modules though: CCK, Views, i18n and e-commerce. After disabling some smaller non-necessary modules I managed to keep it well under the limit, but apparently there are some pretty memory-hungry modules like Ubercart out there.
Finally
If everything is finally up and running, don’t forget to turn on performance caching, disable error logging to the screen and set up a cron job. If this is not allowed at the hosting provider, you can choose the poormanscron module.
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