A welcome note to anyone who hits this site from Planet Drupal. Blame Boris Mann; he decided I was linkworthy because of the Drupal work we’ve been doing overhauling the Savannah Morning News website.

And no, I don’t blog in Drupal. I also don’t swat flies with an elephant gun. Drupal is a powerful, flexible framework for developing online community apps. So far I’ve written a handful, some of which may get back to Drupal.org.

They aren’t available yet because they solve some pretty specific needs for our site. They are also written and tested for 4.6 and not 4.7. Here’s a quick review.

1) generator.module — enables site admins to flatten specific drupal pages (based on the url_alias table) either on demand or via cron. Generator uses CURL to view a Drupal page and writes it to a .php file that can be served by Apache instead of drupal. Includes a check for dynamic pagination ($_GET requests in the URL) so that users are shown dynamic pages when necessary.

2) reputations.module — a very lightwieght module that allows users to rate each other.

3) bloggers.module — a quick-and-dirty blog.module enhancement that shows all active bloggers on a site and allows username searching by alphanumeric chars (username LIKE x%).

4) object cache — a few core tweaks allows the caching of drupal code objects ($user, $node, $block, $profile) to alleviate load on the database. This is still being tested, but initially cut our page time 20% and cut db queries about 70%. (I will detail this more later.)

5) [I forgot this one originally) — user_favorite.module — a simple module that clones the ‘upload user picture function’ and allows users to load a larger photo to their profile. We did extensive customization on the profile, in fact…

6) mdw_profile — not a module, but a series of functions that take the place of user_profile() as the default profile presentation. Why? Design needs. See http://new.savannahnow.com/user/2

Most of these are part of the Savannah project. They were written either to add features or to speed page load. Generator specifically can increase load speeds up to 1000% (depending on server config and module load). That’s because it bypasses Drupal’s bootstrap process entirely. Used with the object cache, it can also ‘pre-cache’ popular content, improving server performance even more.