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By howard on
The largest current installation of Drupal 4.4.0 in terms of community size has recently been upgraded to V.2.0. The common code for this blogging community powers motime.com and tipic.com (in English) and splinder.it (in Italian). Among them, there are more than 180,000 registered users.
One of the more interesting aspects of the Splinder/Motime project is the way that it takes advantage of a series of stand-alone modules written by Tipic, Inc. which showcase the flexibility of Drupal's module-based architecture.
Perhaps the most innovative aspect of this approach is the way in which the platform is integrated with a XMPP (Jabber) instant messaging (IM) system, which runs on Tipic's TIMP2 IM server. Upon registration, the same account is used on Drupal and the TIMP2 server. Users are encouraged to 'subscribe' to each other's blogs so that when a blog to which they have subscribed is updated, an alerts module sends the contents of the update (blog entry, comment or both) directly to the user's IM client if he or she is online and to a dynamically generated web page, always accessible to the logged-in user. This mechanism creates the feeling of "live blogging" among the community members and leads to the creation of very active real-time comment threads when a group of friends find themselves online at the same time.
The system works with any XMPP (Jabber) client which supports headlines and Tipic has also enabled a simple one-click browser-based java IM client for those members of the community that blog from computers on which downloads are not permitted.
With the introduction of IM-enabled mobile devices, the idea of carrying your blog (and the community which it supports) in your pocket is suddenly a reality. For those interested, Tipic provides a free IM client for a range of mobile devices called TipicME.
The blogger's control panel has been completely redesigned and is a great example of the kinds of customized solutions that Drupal permits. Powered by another stand-alone module, the new release shows how it is relatively simple to add increased functionality and to create an intuitive GUI to support it. The blog owner has all of the blog formatting controls that one could wish for, plus a suite of blog privacy and community management tools that will grow ever richer in the coming weeks. There is no other CMS out there that allows such a streamlined development path.
Splinder/motime fully exploits Drupal's powerful theming capabilities to give each site a distinctive look and feel. In addition, much work has been done on the private message module, bringing this function closer to the standards set by the various webmail services.
Actually, since it takes only about 3 minutes to open an account, and it's free -- if any of these features interests you as a user or developer, why not check it out for yourself? It's much easier to understand what we're talking about if you see it for yourself. Btw, both sites are also optimized for the iMode browser.
Tipic, Inc. is proud to be a member of the Drupal community.
Comments
Questions
How much modification to the core was needed to implement all that. I have my own designs on how to reimplement most of it, but most of my designs require minimal core modifications. Hosted user sites very similiar to yours have been part of my overall master plan for almost 2 years now, and the only reason I haven't finished them .. is because I don't want to commit to a solution that will diverge from core.
How many simultaneous users ?
What about scaleability issues? What hardware are you running, and does it sufficiently handle the load you are experiencing.
unrelated but i have always wanted to know: when is there a unix version of your IMP gateway?. I have mailed your marketting/sales departments but have been ignored.
lastly, I would just like to congratulate you on finally upgrading your sites.. i got mightily annoyed trying to get to information on your site to be confronted by broken links. Also , I use tipic IM almost daily, so I just had to say thanks *g*
on second read
It does appear that my previous comment is quite negative in tone. Please don't take it that way , it wasn't how it was intended. I have had questions about tipic's motime implementation for a long time , as I will need to reproduce a fair amount of it myself in the near to mid future. I just took this as an opportunity to ask them, is all.
No problem
Adrian, no worries, but it is always better to double-check in these text-only changes -- so thanks for your sensitivity.
I tried to respond yesterday, but for some strange reason my drupal 'reply to this comment' was on strike...
First of all, on the lack of response, all I can say is that your email either got caught in a spam filter or was inadvertently lost or overlooked. We always try to respond to all legitimate inquiries.
We are currently in the midst of debugging the upgrade on Splinder and will need a couple of days before I can ask one of the programmers to give you some indications. If you can bear with us, I'll see what I can do. Feel free to email me at: howard.liptzin(a)tipic.com... I've put daemon.co.za on my white list. :-)
some answers
> How much modification to the core was needed to implement all that?
We developed 2 new modules: a module called myblog and a module called events (but would be would have been more accurate to call it alerts), using Drupal's APIs. The integration with Instant Messaging and common authentication was achieved developing TIMP2.0 server plug-ins.
> How many simultaneous users ?
We estimate having something like more than 150,000 unique/sessions/day. We can monitor concurrent IM users, but do not track simultaneous sessions.
> What about scaleability issues? What hardware are you running, and does it
> sufficiently handle the load you are experiencing?
Scalability on the Web side has been very time consuming to achieve; on the TIMP2.0 side much easier. The problem with the Web is that Apache and MySQL have to be very carefully balanced. We dynamically serve blog pages from DB slave servers. This is a relatively workable solution, but a problem arises when the slave goes out of synchronization, so to reestablish the synch we have to shut down and take a snapshots. We are looking into testing a MySQL cluster.
> unrelated but i have always wanted to know: when is there a unix version of
> your IMP gateway?
TIMP2.0 runs on Mono (on which we have developed and contributed to the MONO project), but we are not ready to ship it as a commercial product because there are still some stability issues, which are being solved.
I hope that gives you what you need for now. (I may not be able to check this forum frequently, so please use the email channel, above, if you have further questions.)