websites
As explained on Drupal.org today, Drupal 7.0 Alpha 1 has been released, and it incorporates (among other things) a revamped user interface, custom fields (CCK) in core, image handling in core, an update manager, and a ton of 'under the hood' improvements.
This is going to be the best Drupal release to date, for two reasons:
- Drupal has reached critical mass: WhiteHouse.gov, Intel, The Grammy Awards, and heck, even Monty Python are running on Drupal. So is your cousin's Internet startup. Drupal's seen a couple years of great press, and it still hasn't hit the ceiling in potential or mindshare!
- Theming has gotten a whole lot easier: Disregarding the poor english in that description, it will be easier for themers (like me) to crack into designing for Drupal, which means more small businesses and individuals will use Drupal as an out-of-the-box website building solution. Expect a few people who've outgrown WordPress or Joomla to cross the pond... (link is to a placeholder page for now).
Besides these two points, the administration side of Drupal is much improved, and a lot of ridiculous bugs and weird elements from years past have finally been fixed. A few things will have to wait 'till Drupal 8, but for the next few years, I predict Drupal 7 is going to get a lot of traction, especially with the D7CX pledge. (I'm going to have to update my Drupal 6 theme, Airy Blue... ugh).
Why don't you go download Drupal 7 now, and kick the tires a little. It'll be a nice experience, minus the few critical bugs remaining. Once you're finished testing, dive into the issue queue and help change Drupal 7 from alpha to beta, and soon to release!
I'm going to be writing up a post on Building a Theme for Drupal 7 once I get a little time... it'll be on my other site, lifeisaprayer.com.
Packt publishing just announced earlier this morning that Drupal has won the 2009 Open Source PHP CMS award!
Packt Publishing is pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.
Joomla was the second place winner (kudos to them as well!); read the original release here.
With Drupal being used on Whitehouse.gov, AT&T's mobile apps website, and countless other corporate sites and subsites, it's a good time to be in the Open Source arena!
More award categories will be announced soon!
- Most Promising Open Source CMS: winner to be announced on November 11, 2009
- Hall of Fame: winner to be announced on November 12, 2009
- Best Overall Open Source CMS: winner to be announced on November 13, 2009
Initially, when thinking about finally taking the plunge and purchasing a slice or two from Slicehost, I thought, "wow, this is going to be incredibly fast and awesome, compared to my Host Gator account!"
But, after setting everything up and putting Open Source Catholic live on the fresh slice, running free -m, and looking at the results, reality set in: 256 MB of RAM is not much to work with if you're running a Drupal site on a LAMP stack! Drupal usually consumes 15-40 MB of RAM per page view for a logged-in user, and if you have a site with 10 or so logged in users at any moment... well, bad things can happen.
For anonymous users, using Boost will help your site fly no matter the amount of RAM you have. But even so, a bunch of requests to uncached pages will cause your site to load a heck of a lot slower, and will fill up your RAM faster than a fire hose fills up an 8 oz. glass!
Using default Apache, MySQL and PHP settings, free -m showed a full 250 MB of RAM used, along with 400-500 swap space used (swap should be kept to a minimum—if you have a lot of swap usage, that means the hard drive is being used instead of RAM, and the hard drive is inherently many times slower!). After performing a few quick modifications to Apache and MySQL, I was able to get this number down to 140 MB RAM / 40-60 MB swap, on average.
I modified the server configuration in two different places: Apache's httpd.conf, and MySQL's my.cnf: