Event Details

Once a month we bring an expert online to answer your questions. For one hour at a scheduled time, our expert is available via online chat to answer your questions and point you to the resources and tools you need.

Your Drupal experts are David Geilhufe and Keiran Lal. David is Managing Partner at CivicSpace labs and was instrumental in organizing three thousand virtual volunteers over the Labor Day weekend to develop and launch KatrinaList.net, which connected famlies with missing persons in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. His background includes positions as a Senior Program Officer for the Beaumont Foundation, granting computers to schools and community based agencies nationwide, a Senior Product Manager for the online communities software firm, DigiGroups, and the founder of the Eastmont Computing Center, providing technology training and services to all ages in East Oakland, CA.

Kieran is the Development Manager at CivicSpace labs. Kieran was born and grew up in Ottawa, Canada. He has a degree in Systems Design Engineering from Waterloo. Adventuring is his passion. He has hiked 3200 miles on the Appalachian and Pacific Crest trails. Kieran has also biked and run on 3 continents for months at a time. His latest adventure was a 300 mile adventure run on the Lycian way in Turkey. In between adventures Kieran helped found the entrepreneurial Extreme Blue program at IBM. He worked on over 30 innovative projects in research, services, and product groups combining the best technical and business talent to create new business opportunities.

Event Materials

geilhufe: talk to people.

Holly_NTEN: What other questions do you guys have?

geilhufe: Scalability- that is a bigger issue requiring more time. I'll add a more detailed comment to the chat transcript.

Big drupal sites: MTV UK, the onion.

mike_TA: Yes, scalability is a concern of mine,along with performance under RAID-1

twh: I'm a total newbie to Drupal (and CMS generally), so I wonder if there's a "best" place to get started -- i.e. documentation, etc.

geilhufe: Fair number of big social networking sites.

CiviCRM international: Lots of languages. The settings file just moved to the UI so you can change the localization of your DB via the UI.

peter_WGBH: To narrow the scalability question -- is there any documentation/best practices around benchmarking, as part of a Drupal site development process?

geilhufe: This is good for multisite installs and services like CivicSpace On Demand... people can just pick spanish and magically they have a spanish CiviCRM install with localized address formats, currencies, etc.

Scalability is more a function of PHP/Mysql then of drupal.

jdj@sligo.coop: Just joined, not sure if this has been asked: What's the status of CivicSpace being able to use the most recent version of of Drupal and CiviCRM? Is there some point in the near future when that will be possible?

gabber881: But, there is the dev module

peter_WGBH: @geilhufe: thanks. That's good to know.

gabber881: I don't think there is any sort of standard benchmark

which should meet your needs for benchmarking

geilhufe: We have done a lot of work for various customers, and usually the constraining factor is in the webserver or in the DB.

rmonks is on the CivicSpace team and will be sitting in for Kieran who is without a power supply :)

Welcome to Gabbly!

dan@WGBH: @geilhufe: Question about service providers/hosts. Are there established ISPs providing Drupal service? Smaller groups might prefer to 'rent' so as to deflect any security responsibilities.

peter_WGBH: @geilhufe: When you say webserver is the constraining factor, is it typically CPU? RAM? Are the DB issues related to custom schema, or hardware resources devoted to the dbm?

geilhufe: Service providers hosts:http://drupal.org/services

rmonks: Some large Drupal sites, like SpreadFirefox, have been able to run on single boxes with Drupal's built in caching enabled and withstand digg and slashdot traffic without much trouble. It really depends alot of the server configuration.

geilhufe: Bryght and CivicSpace have a lot of experience with large numbers of sites.

mike_TA: @geilhufe: Along the lines of international support - is there a clean way in Drupal to provide different language versions of a particular node? E.g. passing en-us, etc to a URL?

geilhufe: Advomatic Trellon and others have lots of experience with really big sites.

geilhufe: "Renting" to avoid security issues is a common factor. For really big sites, you may find yourself doing a lot of optimization so a dedicated hardware is important... that is the same for any PHP/MySQL ap.

geilhufe: Newbie best place to get started: drupal.org

peter_WGBH: @geilhufe: Is there documentation on optimization?

geilhufe: Try out a demo: http://opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=132

rmonks: There are quite a few Apache optimization books, manually and guides.

rmonks: Google should list dozens, there is also a section in the official Apache manual

geilhufe: performance docs (authored by civicspace): http://drupal.org/node/2601

Holly_NTEN: is there anyone here using Drupal now?

geilhufe: back to Newby starting points: Try the videocasts: http://drupal.org/videocasts

jdj@sligo.coop: Common question about CivicSpace.

The CivicSpace download is now Drupal 5.0 all the unique stuff about CivicSpace is now part of Drupal.

jdj@sligo.coop: Re-post, not sure if I missed the answer for this: What's the status of CivicSpace being able to use the most recent version of of Drupal and CiviCRM? Is there some point in the near future when that will be possible?

geilhufe: Just upgrade old CivicSpace installs to the most recent Drupal/CiviCRM.

geilhufe: CivicSpace On Demand, our hosted service is designed to to always be the most recent version of Drupal/CiviCRM. From now on the civicspace download is basically the Drupal 5.0+ download.

geilhufe: Mike-TA: yes lots of international activity.

check out: http://groups.drupal.org/i18n

And join in on the design discussion.

mike_TA: thank you

geilhufe: As for clean ways for different language version of different nodes, Mike Gifford is probably the best source of the current state of functionality.

Or ask specific folks in the internationalization groups.

Any questions I missed? Did the WGBH guys want more on performance? :)

dan@WGBH: had another meeting. I'm sure he got a good start.

rickcohen: @geilhufe, you didn't miss this one, but I'm wondering a little about long-term sustainability. I'm sure you get this a lot, but what do you see as the prospects for Drupal in a few years? Will it still be around? Will the community still be active?

geilhufe: Drupal is hands down the most sustainable CMS out there.

Why you ask?

rickcohen: As a current user, and someone who would advocate for Drupal, I also don't want to set up my organization with a system that they might not be able to get support on if I were to leave

geilhufe: Community. Around 300 people contributed to the core of drupal in version 4.7

This is very different than other open source communities that might have 5-10 core contributors and then lots of people that build extensions that aren't related to the core.

geilhufe: Long term, this means that most people that scratch their own itch with Drupal, tend to do it by improving the platform, not just by building an add-on.

rickcohen: great! thanks.

geilhufe: Where drupal lags a little (compared to something like Joomla) is commercial firms. At the same time, there are 20 or 30 consulting firms that work exclusively in Drupal.

A good stat is more people make their sole living off Drupal than are employed by Kintera.

And that is growing all the time.

rickcohen: @geilhufe, is there a listing of those firms (and anyplace I could get ratings on any of them)?

geilhufe: Lists: http://drupal.org/services

mike_TA: @geilhufe: are there any resouces on managing drupal content within a code management application (e.g. CVS), and similarly, best practices in regards to workflow?

rickcohen: Thanks.

geilhufe: No ratings yet, but we'll get around to that for CivicSpace Associates soon.

some more drupal/civicspace firms: http://www.civicspacelabs.org/book/export/html/490

Best practice is same as regular software development. BUT you want to get as many changes as you can back into core or into modules.

geilhufe: Usually developers will end up modifying modules, then the module will get upgraded, you want the new functionality, but you have to re-do your hack.

geilhufe: If you got your change into the module in the first place, much better all around.

geilhufe: This is another reason Drupal is considered high quality code... it is easy to hack, but getting code into core or into well respected modules requires a fair amount of code review, etc.

geilhufe: mike_TA: not sure this is relevant but from the drupal handbook: http://drupal.org/handbook/cvs

mike_TA: @geilhufe: i was actually referring to node content. I guess what I'm trying to get at is methods of migrating content from a test drupal instance to a production instance.

I suppose though that this conflicts with the Drupal model in that nodes can be approved for publishing

geilhufe: In the best practices section of the drupal handbook about test sites: http://drupal.org/node/22282

dan@WGBH: @geilhufe: Who do yo hope will end up using CivicSpace On Demand? Non profits? Businesses? Schools?

geilhufe: From one of the really top flight people in the community: http://heydon.com.au/node/973

dan@WGBH: that has three answers-- technology, mission and marketing.

From a marketing perspective, we focus on small groups that need to raise money, communicate via email, run a website and maintain a supporter database.

geilhufe: From a mission perspective, small groups of people, incorporated nonprofits (the 80% of NPOs with budgets under 100K yr), basically folks that can benefit from taking advantage of open source technology.

geilhufe: The other part of the mission piece is we serve large organizations (like WGBH) so that we can build out open source solutions that meet the 80% need. (CivicSpace builds general solutions to general problems-- grassroots journalism, for example--

rather than specific solutions for specific customers.

From a technology perspective, we serve anyone that needs a few hundred "cookie cutter" sites that don't have to be cookie cutter after the local group starts using them.

Drupal questions anyone?

dan@WGBH: thank you

mike_TA: perhaps one more question: how about secure logins, are they supported.

geilhufe: securepages module. SSL.

mike_TA: excellent

thank you

geilhufe: http://drupal.org/project/securepages

dan@WGBH: very interesting and helpful. Thanks again. Good luck all.

rickcohen: @geilhufe: thanks for your help and your time. This was great.

geilhufe: Folks feel free to send me other questions latter and we'll add them to the transcript. Drupal.org forums are your friend. Don't be afraid to post.

rickcohen: @Hollt_NTEN: thanks for putting this together

Holly_NTEN: thanks to all!

feel free to send me any questions or suggestions

at holly@nten.org

peter_WGBH: Thanks!

mike_TA: thank you

geilhufe: cheers all.