Open Source

A few weeks back, after finishing a full day of swimming in PHP, HTML and CSS, I was pondering the great mystery of human existence, but probably had a little too much to drink. The result?

You can buy the design on the following products (via Zazzle):

• Catholic Programmer's T-Shirt
• Catholic Programmer's Mousepad

Would you like the design on anything else? I could do a mug, or socks, or anything else in Zazzle's catalog...

Alternatively, can you think of a way to code this better? ;-)

...and now anyone can set up a fresh, hosted Drupal 7 website in seconds—for free.

From Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal, and president of Acquia, the company behind Drupal Gardens (basically, a site like wordpress.com, except with more awesome):

Today we’ve reached another important milestone at Acquia: Drupal Gardens is now in open beta. No more beta codes. No more waiting to try the service. Now anyone can access Drupal Gardens and create a free Drupal 7 site!

I expect this service, and others like it, to grow in popularity in the coming years. For many parishes, a site on Drupal Gardens would do 90% of what they'd need (or 100%, if they weren't shooting for the stars...).

And it's free (for basic plans), community-based, and super-easy to use (the theme developer is especially nice). On top of that, you can, at any time, download your entire site and put it on your own web host!

In the Archdiocese of St. Louis, I manage more than 15 separate Drupal websites (plus a few others), and I have often wanted to use Apache Solr for search across all these sites. I finally had some time to tackle this issue, and I have a pretty good (and very fast) Solr server set up, and this server is shared across all these sites on two (so far) different webservers through two different hosting companies.

The main Archdiocesan sites (archstl.org, archstldev.com, and stlouisreview.com) are all hosted via SoftLayer in Dallas, while Catholic Youth Apostolate sites (like stlyouth.org and cycstl.net) are hosted via Hot Drupal in North Carolina.

I was able to set up a linode (linode.com) for less than $20 to run Apache Solr via Jetty, and that server is then accessible to all our other servers to send and receive search index data. This solution allows our main web servers to keep resources free from expensive MySQL search queries and the large databases that result from storing 20k+ nodes' search data in the main site DB.

You can find the process by which I set up the search server in this issue on the Development website. The best thing about this system is that I can really make the search server fly; ping takes about 30-40ms between the search server and our other servers, and queries only take about 150-250ms to reach the websites.

Any large organization looking to vastly improve search performance (and usability), especially on a Drupal site (it's so easy, with the Apache Solr Search Integration module pluggable right out of the box), should look into setting up a dedicated search VPS or server (depending on your search traffic).

Our linode Solr server typically sits close to idle, even at peak hours (right now it's showing 0.00, 0.00, 0.00), and I'll probably set it up to do some other tasks off-site as well, since it has the spare CPU, memory and disk space available (and a really fat pipe to the Internet!).

According to Dries Buytaert, a Franciscan Monk was working on Drupal Core at DrupalCon SF last week; he was involved in the core developer's summit with 149 other attendees.

[At Drupalcon, we] organized a core developer summit with 150 attendees, 16 lightning talks, 11 breakout sessions and 1 Franciscan monk.

Where are the Jesuits? The Dominicans? Any other orders? In the Archdiocese of Saint Louis, many of the curial websites are running on Drupal. I also hear the Legionaries have a lot of Drupal involvement (for instance, their Familia website).