Anoop John

One of the Drupal sites we maintain had recently started slowing down considerably in spite of the site mostly being static and in spite of boost set up on the server. On examination of the site we found that two things were happening on the site. One was that the site was being crawled indiscriminately by rogue crawlers. This we solved using the DDOS deflate script and setting DDOS deflate to run every 10 seconds. The second problem was that there were some bots which were continuously sending POST requests to /comment/cid/reply pages. For this we had to come up with a workaround.

In Drupal every path in the site goes via index.php and goes through some Drupal menu. However to make the Drupal application behave live a typical static website in terms of URL architecture sometimes clients request for adding slashes to the end of virtual direcotry paths. At the same time slashes would not look good at the end of virtual file paths. There is an easy way to do this using apache htaccess rules

Sometimes we get requests to update Drupal sites and get it done in less than 5 hours. If we take the Drupal update through the full fail-safe set of steps for Drupal updates we will never be able to complete updates in less than 5 hours on a site we don't maintain. For such sites when the cost of the site going down may not be too high for the site owner it might not be too big an issue if the update is run on a hit or miss approach. We normally do not recommend such an approach but this should work on most small sites without any issues.

Keeping the Drupal core and contributed modules up-to-date (at least on the security updates) is one of the essential steps for keeping a Drupal site safe and secure. Running updates of Drupal modules is usually a straightforward mechanism on a Drupal site that is done right. However what will you do if you do not know how things have been built? What will you do if some of the custom modules used are tied down to specific versions of some contributed module? What if there were custom changes on the site. Here is how you can run updates on a Drupal site almost completely safely.

When you want to move a Drupal site from one hosting server to another you have to ensure that the site works the same way on the new server as it used to work on the old server. There is no real fool proof way of doing this other than to meticulously document all the custom aspects associated with setting up the site and verifying it on the new server. The following is a checklist of information you have to collect before you move your Drupal site from one server to another. Checklist: Migrate from one server to another

If you own a VPS or a dedicated server or a hosting server which allows you to have shell access then you can easily set up your own git server with as many users and as many repositories as can be stored in the space on your server. All you need to do this is a bit of system administration skills and a hosting server that allows you shell access. Read on to see how you can set up your own git server.

If you run a reasonably popular site there is a very good chance that you will get crawled by unscrupulous crawlers once in a while. The regular search crawlers from the popular search engines like the Google bot, Yahoo bot, Bing bot themselves are pretty intensive when they crawl sites but they do have limits on the number of pages crawled per visit and the number of simultaneous connections opened to your server. However there are lots of unscrupulous crawlers like spam bots, email harvesting bots and even some search engines who do not set any reasonable limits on the number of simultaneous connections to your server. There are hardware solutions that are available to prevent this but they may not be affordable for everybody. There is however a simple netstat based solution to prevent DDOS.

OpenOffice Calc is surprisingly an excellent tool for creating wireframes. Wireframes can be created very easily in OpenOffice Calc using the standard shapes available from the drawing toolbar and also by merging cells in the sheet. Each sheet can be used to define a single wireframe and then a single spreadsheet document can contain all the wireframes for a given project. OpenOffice Calc also allows you to export the full set of wireframes as a pdf document with one page corresponding to each sheet in the document. Here are some tips to create good wireframes using OpenOffice Calc.