DrupalEverything.com

Today completed the three day performance adventure with the Lullabots. Rock solid, all the way. (should rhyme with "double rainbow, all the way").

The most important takeaway for the day is the idea that any Drupal user, from the most high powered enterprise user to the dabbler with a $7 bargain-basement shared hosting account, can take some specific steps to improve the performance on their Drupal sites. No matter who you are, if you're using Drupal you have the tools to make it better.

There is a flip side, of course.

Yesterday was Day 2 of the Lullabot Rock Solid Drupal training -- and day 3 is about to start. It's been a heady collection of serious tools that a dabbler like me hasn't really had a reason to work with before, but it's very impressive to see.  

One of the things that sets folks running high-powered sites apart is that they avoid using any sort of GUI (graphic user interface) on their production servers -- all of the memory and processor power used to make pretty windows and check boxes can be better used to deliver web pages to users, after all.  

All right, it's been a long day at Rock Solid Drupal with the Lullabots.  And probably the one during which I've seen the most dramatic changes in what is possible in creating the right sort of environment for a drupal site to really scream.  

I'm playing with the big dogs today. 

Today I'm starting a week of Lullabot's "Rock Solid Drupal" -- a week of training on running high performance, scalable drupal. Lullabot co-founder Matt Westgate and co-hosts Randy Fay and James Sansbury are going drag my dopey, fat, self-taught-drupal-poser butt into the big time and show us how to run sites that don't give users time to wonder if they've left the iron on between page loads.  

I hope you've at least heard about Amazon's web services -- they've opened up an impressive collection of services at prices drastically lower than comparable services.  They're a true game changer, and Drupal lets us take advantage of some of them already, thanks to some of our favorite contributed modules.  

I've been talking up the power of the taxonomy module in the Forums today, and when you get right down to it, it's damn hard to beat the usefulness and power of this apparently simple, unsung hero of the Drupal core pantheon.  

What makes it so interesting is the flexibility of the taxonomy tools.  You need freetagging style anything-goes tags?  It's there.  You need rigid categories to organize content on your site? Done.  You need heirarchical taxonomy to serve as an index of complex content?  It's waiting for you.  

We've finally decided to start heavy duty promotion of our videos-for-parents site, My Kids Turn.  This is a project that has been several months in the making, and while there are still a ton of improvements I want for the site, it's in a place where I'm excited to see if we can build an audience for what we're offering. 

I've been wrestling for a few days with problems with one of my websites, related to database problems, spam, and other junk. 

I got to touch one yesterday.  

And, one of the first things I had to do was check out how some of our web sites display in this format.  I was especially interested in how MyKidsTurn.com displayed.  And it looks . . . great!  Phew!  The YouTube videos even play right in the page.