Code, Camera, Action - Filed under 'drupal'

Drupal is Legos for Websites
- 29 Mar 2011
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Maybe we've recommended building your website with Drupal, the content management system (CMS). Perhaps you've heard how the White House and Congress and Sony Music (and many, many others) use Drupal for their public websites.

Quite right for you to hesitate a bit about using Drupal the platform, and about working with small firms like ours to implement and support your site.

These are both good decisions, I think. Of course I'm biased about el-studio.com, so I'd like to talk a bit about your decision to go with Drupal. Let's be clear about a couple of definitions first, shall we?

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What I learned from ripping 16,000 articles from PDF into Drupal
- 10 Feb 2011
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First off, Drupal is made for lots of content -- 16,000 articles is no problem. Taxonomy, views, search -- so much of what you need for handling big content is baked into the Drupal platform. Add Apache Solr for faceted search, and you have a scalable, flexible web publishing platform.

From a developer perspective, Drupal is a pleasure to work with. Getting content out of PDF, though -- that's not so fun.

The problem is not so much reading the text -- lots of open source and free tools can extract text from PDF. (Though drop capitals and drop quotes do complicate this.) The trick is doing it in the proper order so that the content makes sense. Following columns of text to get articles in proper reading order is tough. Differentiating between columnar text and table text can be even tougher.

Since many of these issues are layout-specific, you really need to look at samples of the PDFs you will be working with. Beyond that, here's what I'd suggest.

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Scaling Drupal on the Amazon Cloud - Drupalcon presentation
- 6 Mar 2009
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@febbraro and I presented our work hosting Drupal on Amazon AWS at Drupalcon last night. Thanks to everybody who could make it. Slides below for download.

We talked about scaling challenges we face doing nonprofit campaigns for the Case Foundation. These are typically limited-time campaigns, with press releases or other promotion.

Our challenge has been supporting relatively high loads for a short time — without going broke. Amazon’s EC2 servers-on-demand have been great for this. Here’s how we use AWS, and architectural issues anyone will face hosting Drupal on the Amazon cloud.

Update: Alan Doucette was kind enough to post video of the talk. Thanks, Alan!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/19641323/Scaling-Drupal-in-the-Cloud-with-Amazon-We...
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Dries' Drupalcon keynote
- 4 Mar 2009
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- code freeze Sept 1
- Drupal 7 release when it's ready thereafter
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How I Sold Our Web Servers and Moved to the Cloud
- 3 Dec 2008
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At NTEN, the nonprofit tech conference, last year I met a developer who was really exited. One of the vendors on the floor was giving away Pentium 3 processors, and he had a box that could use an extra boost.

Me, I never touch hardware anymore. In fact, I don’t really know how many servers we’ve got — or where they are. Amazon knows. About six months ago we switched all our production servers to Amazon’s EC2 cloud infrastructure.

As for how we moved to Amazon — and why we did it — check out this set of slides:
- Drupal in the Cloud: Scaling with Drupal and Amazon Web Services.
Frank of Phase2 Technology and I put these together for today’s Northern Virginia Drupal Meetup. Thanks to everybody who came out for a listen.
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PHP Configuration for Leopard
- 4 Apr 2008
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Both Apache 2.2 and PHP 5 come with every installation of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. MySQL does not. There are a couple of tricks for installing and/or turning them on —and thereby attaining Development Happiness.

Here’s how we configure our development machines at the studio, where our PHP work is primarily Drupaland we use several virtual hosts.

Install MySQL

Not hard, but a little long for this post. Take a look at our instructions for installing MySQL on Leopard.

Configure Apache for PHP and Virtual Hosts

Though Leopard ships with PHP, it’s not turned on by default. Let’s change that, and also turn on the virtual hosts that we’ll use for our various Drupal installs.
- Edit Apache’s configuration file to make the following two changes:
  sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
- Uncomment line 114 so it looks like this:
  LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
- Uncomment line 461 so it looks like this:
  Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
Add your Virtual Hosts

Edit /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf to add your configuration. See our sample configuration for ideas.
NameVirtualHost *:80 <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin eric@localhost DocumentRoot "/Users/eric/Sites/agc" ServerName agc.local RewriteLog /private/var/log/apache2/rewrite_log RewriteLogLevel 0 </VirtualHost>
A couple items of note:
- For development, we put our virtual hosts under users’ ~/Sites folder. That way there are no permissions issues to prevent Apache from serving the code — or from deploying fresh.
- You’ll also have to put agc.local into DNS.
Add the new virtual hostnames to /etc/hosts

Edit /etc/hosts to add a couple of nicknames for localhost:

127.0.0.1 localhost agc.local giving.local givingedit.local miyo.local

Start Apache
- Start System Preferences from the Apple menu.
- Go to the Sharing tab
- Click the checkbox by “Web Sharing”
Done. Let’s test everything by starting Safari and visiting http://agc.local
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