Drupal Views is one of the most powerful modules available, paired with the automation service IFTTT you can post to Twitter in some fancy ways.

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It's rare that I get some free time to update our companies website but I finally had a day this week where I could make all the changes I've been planning. I built The Web Orchards site when we launched over two years ago and due to the unprecedented demand we've had in the time since I've had little availability for updates.

One of the new services we are offering is Drupal Consultancy, when I started using Drupal almost three years ago I didn't realise I would be able to use it for every site we have built since. The issues we've had to overcome for some sites has given us excellent experience in this field which is why I feel we can now offer consultancy services.

One of my recent projects was to build a timesheets system for an Intranet, while we looked at modules already available there were none that provided the functionality that was required. Therefore I built a custom timesheet, administration and reporting system to provide exactly what the customer wanted.

Equally as ground breaking was the work I completed for various major car manufactures last year building a communication tool linking customers and suppliers within the car manufacturing supply chain.

My experience in migrating Wordpress to Drupal on ImAFish came with its own issues but was a total success and gave ImAFish the flexible and powerful content delivery platform it has today.

If you need any Drupal assistance in custom module development, theme development, site migrations or upgrades then visit The Web Orchard's website. I've updated our portfolio too with some of the other exciting projects we have been working on!

Shrewsbury Web Design

Over the past month ImAFish has been experiencing a number of issues with server performance, pages were often slow to load and 'MySQL server has gone away' errors were becoming common. At first I thought it was an issue with the server but after discussing it with my hosting company it turned out ImAFish was using over 10% of the server CPU/Memory power.

I made the following changes to my Drupal install to improve performance:

Remove as many modules as you don't need. 

ImAFish is primarily a blog, I had additional modules for user profiles, currency conversion, flash charts and plotting time lines to name a few. This huge bloat was my main cause of problem, by disabling the modules I didn't need or could do without I made instant performance boosts. Drupal makes it very easy to add additional functionality to your site, unfortunately its very easy to bloat your site.

Rerun the Cron Job

My cron job runs every 24 hours however because of the amount of work it had to process (mainly because of the activity stream module) it was often failing with mysql has gone away errors. After removing a number of modules it took a further three runs of the cron job to clear back all the necessary maintenance (such as deleting spam comments in the akismet queue and clearing the watchdog table).

Update Drupal and all Modules

Once I was happy with my modules I updated the core drupal 5 install then the modules one by one - running update.php each time. It's important that you run the cron job before doing this as I was getting further mysql has gone away errors on update.php before I ran the cron job. A set of updated modules also reduced mysql has gone away errors because of various bug fixes.

Reduce the Number of Blocks on a page

I had about 15 different blocks running down the right of a page, I cut this down to 9 to help reduce server load.

Enable Drupal Page Cache

Simply done in performance settings, there are additional options in Drupal 6. 

Disable Statistics Module

If you can do without the statistics module and rely on outside services such as Google Analytics then this will make a small difference.

Further Updates

Upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 to make better use of the performance features such as block cache and javascript aggregation.

I had to repair a number of database tables as well in the process, this in turn caused some quite serious data loss on the node_revisions table and I lost a number of my recent blog posts. Fortunately I used the Google Cache to recover this data.

The end result has been a much leaner and faster loading ImAFish site.

I'm happy to announce that the Drupal port of Comment Luv is now available for Drupal 6.

It can be downloaded from the Comment Luv page of ImAFish or directly from the Drupal site.

http://www.imafish.co.uk/commentluv

http://drupal.org/project/commentluv

Comment Luv for Drupal 5x has also been updated fixing a number of issues from the initial release.

Many thanks to Lomz for his hard work in updating the module.

When someone posts a comment on your site Comment Luv attempts to find their latest blog post and add the title and link to the bottom of their comment. Comment Luv is great for attracting people to comment on your blogs and a great way to build back links to your site.

I work with the open source content management system Drupal on a daily basis, I've designed sites for local and international organisations. Modules are essential for my work, these are the ones I work with everyday and use in some fashion on almost every website.

1. CCK - Content Construction Kit

Almost every website will need to define content fields in some way so that it is easy for the user to enter data and to report off, the CCK module gives you this flexibility to do this. These can be anything from simple number and text fields to select boxes, radio buttons and image upload fields. CCK is one of the main reasons Drupal is a flexible platform allowing for the quick development of website.

More:www.drupal.org/project/cck

2. Views

Being able to store all your data is great however what really matters is how you display this data to the end user. By being able to select what fields you want to display, pass arguments and setup filters, Views is incredibly powerful and goes hand in hand with CCK.

More: www.drupal.org/project/views

3. Panels

Panels is a great way to mix different views and blocks into the same page in different columns. The panels module comes with either two or three column layouts giving some great flexibiltiy to page design.

More: www.drupal.org/project/panels

4. Pathauto

Clean URL's are a great way to give a more descriptive URL, the path auto module allows you to automatically generate different urls for different types of content. For example on ImAFish it differentiates imafish.co.uk/blog/??? and imafish.co.uk/articles/??? .

More: www.drupal.org/project/pathauto

5. TinyMCE

TinyMCE integrates a Javascript WYSIWYG editor into Drupal providing an easy way to add formatting to pages. It doesn't matter about the type of site I'm building, the client always needs a way to easily edit a pages content. TinyMCE makes this goal possible, I don't think there has been a Drupal site to date where I haven't integrated TinyMCE in.

More: www.drupal.org/project/tinymce

6. IMCE

IMCE integrates an image upload box into TinyMCE and provides basic controls for resizing images. IMCE is here for a similar reason that TinyMCE is, people love to put pictures on web pages and usually these start out on a users computer. IMCE provides an easy way to upload these images so that they can be positioned on a page with TinyMCE.

More: www.drupal.org/project/imce

It's been a while since I've updated Comment Luv for Drupal and I've had a number of requests for a update for Drupal 6.

I've been talking to Andy from FiddyP who's updated his version for Wordpress recently and I hope to have an updated version of Comment Luv within the coming weeks. I've not used Drupal 6 much yet so this will be a good chance to learn some of the updates, I had been waiting for the CCK and Views modules to come out of beta before starting any work on Drupal 6 (I've not used it on any production sites at work yet either).

Comment Luv Drupal is the Drupal based version of the popular Wordpress plugin.

When someone posts a comment on your site Comment Luv attempts to find their latest blog post and add the title and link to the bottom of their comment. Comment Luv is great for attracting people to comment on your blogs and a great way to build back links to your site.

The development release 0.1 is the same as what is used here on ImAFish. The Comment Luv Wordpress plugin has been written by Andy Baily of FiddyP, with his permission and guidance I have simply removed the Wordpress hooks and replaced them with Drupal hooks.

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