Earl Miles and Young Hahn join Dave Burns, Jeff Eaton, and Jeff Robbins to discuss the similarities and differences between Drupal's Panels and Context modules. Earl is the creator of Panels. Young is the co-creator of Context as well as Features, Spaces, and several other great modules. We open up the cage, toss everyone in, and see what happens!

Also be sure to check out David Burns' article "Assembling Pages with Drupal," which also compares and contrasts Panels and Context.

Release Date: July 30, 2010 - 12:13pm Album: Lullabot Podcast Length: 64:07 minutes (25.1 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 54Kbps (vbr)

Nathaniel Catchpole (aka catch) talks about some of the performance-related patches that he has been focusing on for Drupal 7. When Dries gave his State of Drupal keynote address in DrupalCon San Francisco, he presented the Top 20 Drupal 7 core patch contributors and catch was at the top of the list with over 337 patches that he was involved with by that point. He notes that a lot of his patches were a series of smaller performance-related patches that he discovered by using profiling tools such as XHProf and XDebug. He talks about some of the performance changes that got into Drupal 7, as well as how he's been able to work on Drupal 7 core through his job at Examiner.com.

At the time of this recording there were over 120 critical issues for Drupal 7, and at the moment there are around 41 critical issues in the Drupal 7 issue queue.

Release Date: July 29, 2010 - 11:08am Album: Drupal Voices Length: 12:49 minutes (11.79 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)

Mike Carper (aka mikeytown2) talks about the Boost module, which a lightweight performance enhancement for small-scale sites that don't have a lot of dynamic content. After adding some apache rules to the .htaccess file, then Boost will translate Drupal pages into static HTML files and serve those directly instead of going through PHP and MySQL. Carper talks about some of the other caching configuration options, and says that this module is perfect for sites on shared hosting that are looking for a performance boost. He says that Boost can actually make your site slower in some cases where you have a lot of content that is frequently updated. In those cases, Varnish would probably be a better solution, but the Boost module is intended to be a quick and easy solution for smaller websites looking for better performance.

Release Date: July 28, 2010 - 12:17pm Album: Drupal Voices Length: 12:13 minutes (11.24 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)

Khalid Baheyeldin (aka kbahey) has been involved with Drupal since 2003, and focuses on the performance & scalability in Drupal. He talks about his strategies for diagnosing the performance bottlenecks in a Drupal site, and mentions some of the various tools that he prescribes as a solution.

For more information, be sure to check out Baheyeldin's DrupalCon presentation slides and talk titled 2.8 million page views per day, 60 M per month, one server!

Release Date: July 27, 2010 - 11:32am Album: Drupal Voices Length: 9:23 minutes (8.64 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)

This video introduces you to the Vi (and Vim) editor. Vi is the most common text editor that you will have available to you on *nix systems so it pays to at least learn the basics in case you end up somewhere where that is all you have to use. Vim is also actually a very serviceable editor which many people (mostly hardcore geeks) use as their day to day editor. We'll talk briefly about Vi versus Vim, then open a file, move around, and close the the file. Our next video will dive more into editing files with Vi.

Note: There are a lot of editors out there on various systems, notably emacs, nano, and pico. Vi is considered the lowest common denominator (i.e. it is the most commonly available one), which is why it is the one being covered in the command line basics series. It is also the editor that I use personally, so is the one I am most familiar with. Please limit editor war discussions to other threads on the internet that are meant for them.

Narayan Newton (aka nnewton) talks about the future of MySQL and it's various forks and different patch sets that are emerging. He's the lead sysadmin for drupal.org, a database optimization expert with Tag1 Consulting, and the co-maintainer of Pressflow, which is the high-performance Drupal distribution.

Since Sun bought MySQL and then Oracle bought Sun, a lot of the MySQL developers have left to Monty Program Ab and there are more decisions that need to be made by database administrators.

There is an active issue on Drupal.org that discusses the various forks, and whether Drupal should recommend a particular flavor of MySQL, and Newton summarizes the current MySQL landscape as having the following different options:

• MySQL/ORACLE
• MySQL/MariaDB (Monty + a lot of the original mysql devs are here)
• MySQL/Percona (Are partners of MariaDB and say they are going to switch to distributing it)
• MySQL/Ourdelta (Are already just redistributing MariaDB)
• MySQL/Drizzle (Not production ready)

Since the recording of this interview, it appears as though Percona and others are converging around MariaDB as a drop-in replacement for MySQL. Newton also mentions Oracle's MySQL 5.5, a set of patches from Percona, Percona's XtraDB, the Open Database Alliance (which includes Monty Program and Percona), the InnoDB Plugin as well as Google patch set for MySQL and Facebook patch set for MySQL. Other notable MySQL fork products include Drizzle and OurDelta.

Here's a couple of useful graphics to help visualize the MySQL landscape:

• Graphic of MySQL forks as of March 2010
• Graphic of MySQL forks as of August 2009

Newton also talks about benchmarking, the grinder load test framework, and the limitations of using micro-benchmarks apart from testing on actual web sites. He also talks about how Drupal 7 gives the ability to run multiple backends including a combination of MySQL and memcache and MongoDB and even scaling writes with Cassandra.

For more information, be sure to check out Newton's DrupalCon talk entitled The Future Of MySQL: Forks, Patches And Decisions

Release Date: July 26, 2010 - 12:43pm Album: Drupal Voices Length: 13:53 minutes (12.77 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)

Release management with version control Managing the code on your servers is a very important part of the release process. Over the years we've tried many different ways and have found the below process as a tried and true starting point, but here we'll focus on revision control (Subversion or Git) and the use of tags in each for any given project. Since many of our clients are large traffic websites and need multiple web heads, we also have some standard practices and scripts that we like to use on our projects to help keep the web heads synchronized. So let's take a look.

This weekend is DrupalCamp NYC at the Dibner Building at NYU Polytech in Brooklyn. Lullabot co-founder Jeff Robbins will be giving a talk entitled "Beyond Web 2.0: Designing for the Undesignable" on Saturday (the 24th) at 4:50pm in rm JAB474. You can find the full schedule here. Lullabot is sponsoring the event, so look for our table, come on by, and say "hello".

Date(s):  July 24, 2010 (All day) - July 25, 2010 (All day)

Károly Négyesi (aka chx) talks about MongoDB and NoSQL databases. He's working on building a MongoDB module that integrates with Drupal 7's FieldAPI pluggable storage to make Examiner.com more scalable. He's also working on a MongoDB DBTNG driver for Drupal 7.

Négyesi mentions Brewer's CAP Theorem, which states that distributed systems can only choose two of the following three options of Consistency, Availability or Partition Tolerance. MySQL has a relational data model and has chosen Availability and Consistency while MongoDB has a document-oriented data model and has chosen Consistency and Partition Tolerance. Below is a graphic from Nathan Hurst's blog that visually represents the different NoSQL systems.

For more information, be sure to check out the MongoDB - Humongous Drupal presentation from DrupalCon San Francisco.

Release Date: July 22, 2010 - 12:09pm Album: Drupal Voices Length: 16:33 minutes (15.2 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)

Jeremy Andrews (aka Jeremy) of Tag1 Consulting has been involved with Drupal for over nine years. He ran KernelTrap.org, which was one of the first Drupal websites that we receiving a lot of traffic. Andrews has continued to be involved with performance and scalability, and he talks about some of the work that he's doing with Examiner.com and Drupal 7 to figure out a lot of the tools and techniques to make the site scalable and performant. He talks about MongoDB, and some of the other scalability improvements of Drupal 7. While there are a lot of scalability improvements to Drupal 7, the performance has taken a hit and they're in the process of figuring out the best practices in that area as well including writing a module to integrate with RRDtool, the round-robin database tool that is used for tracking time-series data. Some other monitoring tools that Andrews mentions include mysqlreport, Nagios monitoring and Cacti Graphs.

Release Date: July 21, 2010 - 11:16am Album: Drupal Voices Length: 7:24 minutes (6.83 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)

Get In-Depth With The Drupal API Early Bird Special!

Be sure to register before August 20th and save lots of money thanks to our early bird special! Whether you're registering for an individual workshop or for the whole week you can save big by registering early.

Customize and extend Drupal and bend it to your will! Spend a week with the Lullabot team and get an in-depth understanding of Drupal programming.

Immerse yourself with back-to-back workshops: Basic Module Development & Advanced Drupal Development. Register for either one individually, or register for the whole week and save.

We'll work from an example site, and extend the functionality by adding additional features via custom modules we'll write over the course of the week. We'll talk about how Drupal works under the hood and how to approach writing a Drupal module, providing best practices from our experience. There will be plenty of exercises, examples and always room for questions!

Basic Drupal Module Development - September 20th & 21st

On Monday and Tuesday, we'll discuss the basic knowledge that all Drupal developers will need in order to customize Drupal, understand the APIs, and find the essential resources important to Drupal development.

Topics We'll Cover Include:

• Basics of the Drupal Architecture
• Hooks: Event-driven interaction
• The menu system: routing Drupal requests
• Form API basics
• The Database Layer
• Creating theme functions
• Security basics
• Analyzing performance

You'll also want to bring your list of things that you're trying to do and have questions about. We're here to help!

Who Should Attend

Anyone with a basic understanding of PHP who wants to learn to extend Drupal's functionality.

Advanced Drupal Development - September 22, 23, & 24

On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday we'll dive deeper into Drupal's framework with a look at some of the more advanced APIs, learn to integrate our code with popular contrib modules such as Views, CCK, and others, and discuss more advanced Drupal programming topics such as automated unit tests.

Topics We'll Cover Include:

• API Changes between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7
• Advanced Form API wrangling
• Understanding the theme registry
• Theming for developers
• Creating Views-integrated modules
• Module development insider tricks
• Advanced database tricks
• Implementing Drupal's Ajax APIs for whiz-bang user interfaces
• Revision control and code deployment strategies
• Automated testing

Who Should Attend

Anyone who understands the concepts covered in the Basic Module Development Workshop above.

What Should I Bring?

AttendeesBring your laptop in order to get the full benefit of the workshop. Lullabot will provide each participant with free wifi and their own hosted Drupal site to work on during class.

Additional Information

Each morning will begin with registration and continental breakfast at 9:30am. Classes run from 10am to 5pm.

Registration includes continental breakfast and lunch daily.

We will be working with Drupal 6, but questions about other Drupal versions are always welcome.

Need More Information?

If you need help making a decision about attending or have further questions about the class, please contact us here.

Josh Koenig (aka joshk) of Chapter Three talks about the Pantheon Project that allows you to run Drupal on a cloud infrastructure either as a Amazon EC2 machine instance or on the Rackspace Cloud. Chapter Three also has a service that is currently in private beta that provides a hosted version of Mercury on the Rackspace Cloud starting as low as $50/month. Koenig talks about some of the advantages of hosting on a cloud infrastructure as well as who the target audience is for making the leap into hosting on a cloud infrastructure.

For more information, check out the Pantheon group on g.d.o. or watch Koenig's DrupalCon San Francisco presentation titled "A Match Made in the Cloud – How to Best Take Advantage of Cloud Technologies with Drupal Sites"

Release Date: July 20, 2010 - 12:50pm Album: Drupal Voices Length: 12:13 minutes (11.24 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)

Barry Jaspan (aka bjaspan) talks about the Amazon Web Services infrastructure that he engineered for running Acquia Hosting. For more information, be sure to also check out Acquia's recent webinar on Amazon Web Services building blocks for Drupal or Japan's DrupalCon presentation titled "Challenges of hosting Drupal on Amazon Web Services (AWS)"

Release Date: July 19, 2010 - 11:57am Album: Drupal Voices Length: 10:29 minutes (9.64 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)

Are you a Drupal expert? Are you excited to travel to exotic locations, meet interesting people, and share your knowledge with them?

Lullabot is looking for part-time freelance Drupal teachers in North America and Europe to teach at our private and public workshops. If you've got a flexible schedule and can travel for as much as a week every month or two, this is a great opportunity to work with Lullabot's outstanding team and empower people with Drupal.

You should:

• be a Drupal expert
• be an experienced contributor to the Drupal community
• have great communication skills and a sense of humor
• have teaching experience ('Camps, 'Cons, classes... you name it)
• be able to commit to doing a certain number of teaching days each quarter
• be flexible and reliable

We will:

• train you as a Lullabot teacher
• provide the training curriculum and equipment
• pair you with experienced Lullabot teachers (you won't need to go out on your own right away)
• send you around the world delivering fun Drupal training to smart people
• work with your schedule
• pay you for your time and cover your travel expenses

Blocks vs. Context vs. Panels

As with many facets of Drupal, and coding in general, there are multiple ways to accomplish the same task. A good exmple of this was with the recent additions to the Lullabot team. The expanded team brought together three skilled developers and an amazing designer each with their own methods of site building. On one side we have Jerad Bitner and myself, who for the past few years have been building sites exclusively with Panels module. On the other side we have James Sansbury and Jared Ponchot who also build beautiful sites using the more recent Context module.

Our first collaboration was the redesign of Lullabot.com, since this project was initially designed and scoped by James and Jared, the decision to use Context module was already in place. I was in no rush to learn Context, when I knew the same result could be achieved with Panels. Lucky for me James and Jared are both excellent resources for answering questions and giving great examples. Now that the project is complete I have a better understanding of Context module. This article is intended to identify the similarities, differences, pros and cons of using each module to build a Drupal website.

The Lullabot team will be in Portland August 2nd through the 6th teaching a week of Drupal workshops at the Hotel Monaco. We've got a great space reserved and some out-of-town workshop attendees who would love to meet the great Portland Drupal community. So, as we usually do when we're in town, we're organizing a Drupal Meetup on Tuesday, August 3rd! We'll have a cash bar, snacks, and a video projector and sound system. It's free and open to all, so come out and meet the 'bots and the workshop attendees. These events are always a great time.

We'll keep the format pretty open with lightening talks and question/answer sessions. We'd love to hear about the cool stuff that you're working on, Drupal discoveries, or just questions that you need answered.

Location:

Hotel Monaco
Alder Creek Room: 2nd floor
506 SW Washington
Portland, OR, 97204

Time:

7pm 'til 10pm

Hope to see you there!

Date(s):  August 3, 2010 (All day) Text Date:  Tuesday at 7pm

Mike Meyers, the CTO of Examiner.com, talks about migrating their site to Drupal 7 and gives an update since his previous interviews at DrupalCon DC and DrupalCon Paris. He discusses how he is able to attract top Drupal talent by emphasizing contributing back to the community and developing on the cutting edge platform of Drupal 7. Examiner has also subcontracted with a number of Drupal shops like Tag1 Consulting for performance, Cyrve for data migration and Boombatower Development for testing and updating the coder upgrade module. Examiner was also a primary sponsor of the Drupal Security White Paper co-written by Greg Knaddison. Meyers also talks about some of the features of Drupal 7 such as being able to use multiple database backends, fields in core, RDF, and the semantic web as well as how they're using Open Atrium and Drupal for their internal processes to provide collaborative platforms for their citizen reporters and citizen journalists. Finally, he talks about his excitement over the growth of Examiner.com and re-launching it on a foundation of Drupal 7 to continue to iterate and innovate on new features.

For more information on Examiner.com's migration to Drupal, be sure to check out this case study from Acquia.

Release Date: July 15, 2010 - 11:48am Album: Drupal Voices Length: 14:31 minutes (13.35 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)

Jeff Miccolis of Development Seed talks about the open data site that they created for the World Bank at http://data.worldbank.org. He talks about some of the modules that they used to create the site such as Features, Context, Views 3, and open source visualization tools like OpenLayers and Flot (which is a jQuery library alternative to Flash). The maps are powered by a combination of MapBox using TileMill and served with OpenLayers. For more information, be sure to check out the announcement blog post from Development Seed.

Release Date: July 14, 2010 - 12:28pm Album: Drupal Voices Length: 8:43 minutes (8.03 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)

JP Klein talks about how NBC Universal is using Drupal on the backend to run sites like Telemundo, Bravo and soon SyFy. NBC is using the services module to feed XML into their front-end written in a custom PHP framework. He talks about NBC's customized content publishing model, some of the other modules that they've been using and looking forward to (such as the Media module), and the future of Drupal at NBC Universal.

Release Date: July 13, 2010 - 11:20am Album: Drupal Voices Length: 10:47 minutes (9.92 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)

Lullabot's Jared Ponchot and James Sansbury will be at DrupalCamp Atlanta.

Date(s):  October 1, 2010 - 11:00pm - October 2, 2010 - 11:00pm Text Date:  First weekend in October