Drupal

The Industry Standard, aka thestandard.com, is using Drupal. The Industry Standard features news and analysis that covers emerging technologies and companies, venture funding, acquisitions, site launches, and other developments in the internet space. This system is built as a prediction market, intersected with a reputation-based social network. The site is part of the IDG network, which includes sites like Computerworld, Infoworld, JavaWorld.com, Macworld, PC World, and more.

Like most big Drupal sites, they use CCK, Views, memcache, and a master-slave database configuration. Two noteworthy items are the fact that they use Apache Solr for search, and Mollom as their spam deterrent.

Hagen Graf has written his second German Drupal book: Drupal 6: Websites entwickeln und verwalten mit dem Open Source-CMS published by Addison-Wesley. The book also comes with a German Drupal 6 training video. And for every copy sold, 1 EUR is donated to the Drupal Association Thanks Hagen!

@Hagen, next time take a picture of your book on my website? ;-)

The book talks about Mollom!

Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 is an update to David Mercer's two year old book Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites.

Just like David's previous book, this book is geared towards people who are new to Drupal and that have little or no experience in website design, PHP, MySQL or HTML. If you want practical advice on how to get a Drupal site up and running, this book is for you. Unlike David's first Drupal book, this book also caters to the intermediate Drupal user as it talks about Drupal's content construction kit, actions, triggers and even jQuery. Reading this book won't make you a Drupal expert, but it will give you a solid base from which to build.

Matt Butcher's Learning Drupal 6 module development book an great introduction to begin developing on Drupal. It is not for the die-hard developer, but it looks like a must have for new Drupal developers. Thanks for for putting this book together, Matt!

Last week at DrupalCon Szeged I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation. The video of the presentation is provided below, and you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 11MB) as well.

The presentation discusses the results of the recent survey that I conducted; the survey ran for 30+ days and collected more than 1300 responses so it should provide a good idea of the community's current thinking. I'll provide more color and details about the survey results in a number of follow-up posts.

I finally had some time to take out my copy of Lullabot's Understanding Drupal DVD for a quick photo shoot. This DVD provides a broad overview of Drupal, and covers all the terminology and fundamental concepts of a Drupal site. It is great for people that are new to Drupal. For people that have Drupal experience, it might be too introductory, but those should certainly wait for the next DVD in their series.

Lullabot also promised to make a donation to the Drupal Association for every copy sold. Thanks 'bots!

24 heures, a Swiss newspaper published daily by Edipresse relaunched on Drupal recently. With more than 200 titles, Edipresse is one of Europe's biggest media and communications companies. According to Pierre-Jean Duvivie from Edipresse, 24 heures has more than 70,000 visitors a day and according to Wikipedia it has a readership of 245,000. Other Drupal sites from Edipress are http://www.tdg.ch, http://www.femina.ch (covered before), and http://www.lesquotidiennes.com. Cool!

English rock band Led Zeppelin is using Drupal for their official website at http://www.ledzeppelin.com. According to Wikipedia, they have their own label called Swan Song Records. Rock!

Our paper Java Performance Evaluation through Rigorous Replay Compilation (PDF, 1.9MB) has been accepted for publication at OOPSLA'08. This is joint work with Andy Georges and Lieven Eeckhout that I worked on before I got my PhD and left the university to start Acquia.

Good news because OOPSLA, which is short for ACM conference on object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications has incubated many state-of-the-art technologies, including design patterns, refactoring, aspect-oriented software development, dynamic compilation and optimization, the Unified Modeling Language, and more.

Paper abstract

A managed runtime environment, such as the Java virtual machine, is non-trivial to benchmark. Java performance is affected in various complex ways by the application and its input, as well as by the virtual machine (JIT optimizer, garbage collector, thread scheduler, etc.). In addition, non-determinism due to timer-based sampling for JIT optimization, thread scheduling, and various system effects further complicate the Java performance benchmarking process.

Replay compilation is a recently introduced Java performance analysis methodology that aims at controlling non-determinism to improve experimental repeatability. The key idea of replay compilation is to control the compilation load during experimentation by inducing a pre-recorded compilation plan at replay time. Replay compilation also enables teasing apart performance effects of the application versus the virtual machine.

This paper argues that in contrast to current practice which uses a single compilation plan at replay time, multiple compilation plans add statistical rigor to the replay compilation methodology. By doing so, replay compilation better accounts for the variability observed in compilation load across compilation plans. In addition, we propose matched-pair comparison for statistical data analysis. Matched-pair comparison considers the performance measurements per compilation plan before and after an innovation of interest as a pair, which enables limiting the number of compilation plans needed for accurate performance analysis compared to statistical analysis assuming unpaired measurements.

DaliCMS in an Open Source Web 2.0 content management system based on Glassfish, Sun's Open Source application server written in Java. DaliCMS is developed by LodgON and ships with Mollom support out of the box. Instructions on how to configure Mollom are available on this DaliCMS project page. Thanks LodgON!

During my keynote presentation at DrupalCon Szeged this week, I announced that Angela "webchick" Byron will be my Drupal 7 co-maintainer. For the duration of one release cycle, she will help me coordinate Drupal 7 development.

The main reasons for electing webchick is her interest in usability, test-driven development and custom content types. Plus, she knows how to bring people on board and how to set them up for success. She is a massive asset for Drupal, and a role model of what a Drupal community member can be.

Photo credit: Chrys.

Sun Microsystems recently launched another cool Drupal site: Sun Learning Exchange. The site enables Sun employees to easily publish rich media training content such as videos, podcasts, and documents to be accessed by all Sun employees and customers. Media can be rated, sorted, and tagged by site members and is automatically transcoded and hosted on LimeWire. The site was built with the help of our friends at Chapter Three. Sweet!

Computer and video game developer Electronic Arts (EA) is using Drupal for their upcoming shooter game called Battlefield Heroes. I'm not big on games, but their trailer looks fun so maybe I'll give it a try. It sounds like, for a change, I wouldn't repeatedly get killed by a ultra-skilled 15 years old ...

According to the trailer, they have big plans for their website. They want to use it to host a long-running territorial conflict meta-game. Curious to learn if that will be built in Drupal too.

Exactly one year after he took his first breath, he got his first laptop ...

In two weeks, 500 Drupalistas will come together in Szeged Hungary for this year's European DrupalCon. It will be the first Drupal conference in Central Europe. While that is a bit of an experiment, I'm excited by it as we get to preach and listen to new and different users. What is not to like about that?

Even if you can't attend or if you are not doing business in Central Europe, you should still sponsor. Why?

There is no denying that many Open Source conferences work by a different set of rules than traditional conferences. DrupalCon is one of them. Your sponsorship makes it possible for 500 people to get together, to get aligned, to plan, and to get actual work done. It directly enables them to add to Drupal's success. Furthermore, by setting them up for success, you're indirectly enabling tens of thousands of people world-wide. Everyone, including you, will benefit from the network effects. It would be short-sighted to only think of sponsoring DrupalCon as a means to generate direct sales leads for your business, wouldn't it? You should sponsor because you want to invest in Drupal's continued international growth and success, regardless of where you have setup shop.

Thanks to all the DrupalCon Szeged sponsors that get this!

I've been working with Gábor Hojtsy for almost 5 years. First as a contributor to Drupal, next as my Drupal 6 co-maintainer, and more recently as a co-worker at Acquia. Yesterday, Gábor got married with Zsuzsi, so needless to say, a number of us traveled to Hungary to attend his wedding.

Drupal boys. From left to right: Kristof Van Tomme (DrupalCon Szeged organizer), me, Zsuzsi, Gábor and Kieran Lal (Drupal Association and Acquia).

More pictures are available in my photo gallery.

It was really wonderful to witness and take part in their wedding. We had a great meal and party on the river banks of the beautiful Danube. Congratulations and may you continue to love one another forever!

It is 08/08/08 today. The day they took PHP4 behind the barn and shot it through the head. The date of the official discontinuation of PHP4 -- even for security issues.

Unfortunately, as I predicted in April 2007, PHP4 is still more widely used than PHP5 is. According to the latest Nexen data, PHP5 has only a 33% install base after more than four years.

Drupal's success depends on that of PHP, and PHP5's slow adoption rate has certainly been annoying. Hopefully, we can all move forward together now. Drupal is ready for it.

If you still haven't upgraded to PHP5, today would be a good day.

Ben and I printed some Mollom t-shirts and we're going to ship some to people that contributed a Mollom plugin or that took advantage of the Mollom API in new or clever ways.

We've just sent some t-shirts to Mattias (Wordpress plugin), Tijs (PHP5 class), Markus (Joomla extension), Jan (Ruby library), Andy (Python library), Wim (summer intern) and more. Let us know if you integrated Mollom in your favorite tool or service!

We also set aside some t-shirts for people that write the best Mollom reviews or otherwise help us spread the word in new, clever or interesting ways ...

Recently, Google launched Google Insights. Like with Google Trends, you can just type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches. You’ll also have the ability to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (commonly referred to as verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges. Great for marketing people.

Below are some examples specific to Drupal ...

The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

In China, Wordpress is winning hands down. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

In my home country, Belgium, Drupal is almost as strong as Wordpress but not nearly as strong as Joomla. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

Regional Drupal interest by country. Google uses the term 'search volume index' for these heatmaps, meaning that they normalized the data by the total traffic from each respective region. In other words, just because two regions show the same percentage for a particular term doesn't mean that their absolute search volumes are the same. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

In the US, the west coast beats the east coast. Based on 'search volume index'. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

Regional Drupal interest by city. Based on 'search volume index'. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

The top search on Drupal -- great for marketing people. Breakout means that the search term has experienced a change in growth greater than 5000%. See Google Insights results for Drupal.