General discussion

Dear All,
I would like to know how much we all are aware of the platform as a service model and hosting Drupal or PHP apps in general there.
Would it be a good idea to host apps in a PaaS rather going for a dedicated server hosting?
For this purpose I have created a survey to better understand the Platform as a Service reachability to developers and hence we can contribute more towards open-source development of such PaaS.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/S35TLSP

Thanks, Deep

Hey guys,

I am not quite sure, if this is the right place for my request. Hope so.

Right now I am working on a big project, right now there're more than 100 active Modules/Module Parts, 50 Views, and so on. For the first time with drupal I have to think about performance, and I think it is a very complex topic. First thing I did was to start caching, for example views blocks, etc. But I want to "dive" deeper into this topic, so I need some "help"

Are you a film buff who would like to take over a UK film site?

I have a Drupal 7 site at http://www.reviews-now.com that has been listing all the theatre released films in the UK and publishing all the press releases about the films, stills and trailers. It’s currently registered until June 2013 and I’m willing to transfer it to a new owner free of charge.

I was asked to help out a client i use to work with, but i dont work in drupal anymore and can i just say that i am so glad i dont. After the site that i created had been taken over by someone else it has now been completed destroyed. Its looks really good though ( better then i had it ) but the client can in no way ,shape or form edit anything on the site. It has gone into hyper complex mode. let me give you an example

So there is are four rectangles ( i dont want to say blocks because that will confuse me has i carry on ) on a page each displaying information .. arguable static base information. So what did this person do. Well he created a rabbit hole. Each of these rectangles are pages themselves. They then each have their OWN view with a filter based on the content type and a taxonomy term , that is all the view is. Then .. and this is where it gets loopy, the views are blocks. So there are 4 views which are 4 blocks to display 4 rectangles of static content. All of this could have been created as one page of type page because it does not matter what taxonomy it is. This guy likes taxonomy though because there are tons of them.

I know these types of drupal vs. wordpress maintenance questions have been asked before but I want to hear from a different audience than most other posts and have a true interest in peoples responses.

Two important points before you consider responding:

1) Please if you respond provide a link (or links) to a larger complex drupal site that you have maintained through at least 1 full point upgrade of drupal (i.e. 4->5, 5->6, etc.). Your opinions otherwise are not based on real life experience and the web is full of answers from those viewpoints.

2) This is not a wordpress vs. drupal debate or any such thing. Personally, I find Drupal very useful but painful to keep current - I am curious of other folks who run (again large and complex sites - include links) in other systems and their experiences overall with the rate of plugin updates, core updates breaking the site, core updates breaking plugins, etc.

And before someone says it large and complex is indeed relative - I'm speaking of sites that are not just blogs, not just brochures, but that have active forums, customized user experiences/profiles, fair amount of content, perhaps multiple authors, social media aspects, etc.

Please only people who have real-life experiences (verifiable) respond.

If you're thinking about creating a new blog using Drupal 7 - and want to go for a snazzy responsive Web design (as comes standard with Zen), then check out this post that highlights what you need to get started, how to develop your site on a local machine, how to design using Zen subthemes, and how to deploy to the live server.

http://smepals.com/create-blog/how-create-blog-one-day-drupal-7

Hope you find it helpful...

Cheers,