General discussion

I just recently uploaded Drupal onto my database. It was troublesome effort at first, but with the great help of the Drupal community I was able to suffice. However, after doing some research, I realize that Drupal might not be for me.

Although I run a content based website, it isn't a blog, but a full fledge news website. The reason why I uploaded Drupal was because I thought it would expand some of the features that my current CMS offers.

Such features included:

An Email Notifications system which members can use to be notified about when the website is updated. Members can choose whether they want to be notified Daily, Weekly or Bi-Weekly. The email will consist of a list of direct links to articles on the website.

An image directory that allows me to upload images directly through an FTP program onto my server. I will have the control to create a file folder where all these images are place in. All images will be thumb nails which I can control the size (drupal offers this feature already).

To get an idea of what I'm talking about, please visit the BBC website (my current site is based on this concept): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/default.stm

All thumbnails are the same size on the front page. However, if you click on the thumbnail links to the full article, you will see that the image are of different sizes.

Going back to the front page, the images sit right next to a small summary. However, I have a two table setup unlike the BBC site whereby the images is above the text. In the case of my website, the picture is beside the text. This format saves space.

Not tested for all Drupal Installations, so advanced users might like to go through these and correct some of the techniques I use.

I’m sure you’ve all noticed upon a fresh installation of Drupal, the cms is super fast, allowing you to instantly switch to different pages and nodes, provided that your hosting environment is fast.

Speed is an important fact in webpages, because with so much competition, users may not wish to wait that extra 5 – 10 seconds, for your jam-packed featured pages to show.

So having used Drupal for over 6 months, in this time period, I’ve learnt a few lessons of what can bog down the pages. So I’ll go through some common ones and techniques that can help.

Many of the techniques require either an ssh connection to the server, so please contact your administrator to make the changes accordingly.

First A few hours ago I typed top on the server, and that resulted in a load of 30.!!!

As I just installed the image block for imagegallery, I knew that this was affecting the performance, so I went into admin/blocks and disabled imagegallery

2 minute later I typed top, and the server figure dropped to 6.3, which was still very high.

As the webpage is a Medium traffic site, I knew that there was some modules I had to let go of, many of these modules will be fine for low traffic sites, but for large sites, they can clog up the site.

Hi everyone,

I've been looking through the docs and cannot find anything relating to this. What we'd like to do is have many different sites controlled by one drupal config.

So, we would have

www.example.com
www.example2.com
www.example3.com

all controlled by one drupal install.

I was wondering if anyone had opinions on using Massmailer and Simplenews

For me...

Simplenews installed very easily and I think it's fairly intuitive for users to subscribe and manage which newsletters they would like to receive. I really like that simplenews newsletters are also nodes meaning of course that they are also part of the whole site, can be categorized, commented on, etc... I think it's a pretty great module.

Hi All

Does Drupal have a facility to provdide a marketplace in a Forum type apearance where forlks can add their own postings and read that of others?

Two questions
1) Can I use Drupal for this and are there any examples?

2) My current site is driven by a custom CMS written in PHP and mySQL. Will I be able to add drupal features to this or will I have to redo the whole site?

Thanks

Ben

I think the biggest problem facing most new users of Drupal is understanding exactly what they want out of categorization.

Nine times out of 10, people just want a simple navigation system, linked to a series of static pages. I'm sure that Drupal can do this, but with some effort. The problem with Drupal is that it is way more powerful than a simple static page delivering engine. Although this may be true, it is important for people to be able to start somewhere, and then realize somewhere down the road that they can expand their site to include the powerful features of Drupal with little effort.
Now, the biggest hang-up I can see with Drupal (I'm a very inexperienced Drupal user - a day and a half) is the characterization of categories. It looks to me like Drupal has been struggling with this for some time now. It would be nice to have a clear picture of what categorization can do.

I would like to show a example site that would demonstrate what I typically expect out of categories. I would like to start a conversation on what people expect to see on their sites, and how they describe them. It is not necessarily easy to do this. The example below is very terse and obviously could contain a LOT more functionality, but the fundamentals are there.

I don't ultimately know whether Drupal will be able to perform this way (easily). But if there is a way to categorize content, then more than likely there will be a way to organize a site such as "Joe's Online Coffee House".