ted serbinski – a blog about drupal, macs, productivity, health, and bmws

The .htaccess file included with Drupal tells Apache to send all 404 requests to Drupal to handle. While this is great in some cases, the performance degradation can have a huge impact on a site that has millions of users.

When Drupal processes a 404, it has to bootstrap Drupal, which includes Apache loading up the PHP process, gathering all of the Drupal PHP files, connecting to the database, and running some queries. This is quite expensive when Apache can be told to simply say "Page not found" without having to incur any of that overhead.

Now you might say your site doesn't have any broken URLs as you haven't changed any. Well that's great, but as your site grows, it is going to be a target for spammers and hackers. They are going to start requesting all sorts of file to see if they can find an exploit. Instead of bootstrapping Drupal each time to tell them that DLL file doesn't exist, it would be much better if Apache could just say that, to save resources for your real users.

So, what can you do? How can you stop Drupal from handling 404s but not break modules like imagecache?

At the ParentsClick Network we are soon to be rolling out many more sites on our platform. Because of our unique community API (which I will be detailing in a future post) we are running many sites (many not yet released) on the same install of Drupal, with the same database, and no shared tables. Yes, no typos there. More on just how that works in a later post.

One thing we have to do is change the theme based on the URL, along with a host of other things. ZivTech recently posted about changing themes, but for our setup, we need something more low level. Hence this technique.

SimpleFeed 2.1

SimpleFeed 2.1 has been released, grab it while it's hot!

This release fixes a number of outstanding issues and greatly improves the robustness of SimpleFeed. Highlighted fixes include:

* Critical update, fixes updating of feed items to use the new unique identifier, before it only made it through 50 items, causing duplicate headaches
* Unique identifier for feed items now relies on a combination of title & link, which will pave the way for updating changed feed item bodies later
* Support for much longer length URLs
* Improved database indices
* Fix expiration of feed items so it can run properly as anonymous user cron

Well, it took longer than I expected (announced it a couple months back), but I'm pleased to announce that my Blueprint Drupal Theme has been released!

This theme uses the most excellent Blueprint CSS framework to setup a starter Drupal theme to make theming websites faster and easier, especially in the cross browser area. The benefits of this framework include:
* An easily customizable grid
* Sensible typography
* Relative font-sizes everywhere
* A typographic baseline
* An extendable plugin system
* Perfected CSS reset
* A stylesheet for printing
* Powerful scripts for customizing your layout
* No bloat of any kind

Compared to the YUI grid CSS, I find Blueprint simpler and more elegant. I have used both frameworks on various projects and the Blueprint has consistently been easier and faster to work with.

SimpleFeed was released a little over 4 months ago and has been working out very well. However, it still wasn’t fast enough—-at least for me. It could work faster, it could be more efficient. So over the past month or two I’ve really reworked some of the internal logic, making things much more efficient. I also borrowed a tip from FeedAPI about hashing entire feeds to check for updates faster and simplified the unique hash of each feed item to be much faster to compute and compare.

When I redesign my blog, I like to release the previous theme out into the open for anyone to make use of. I did this last year with the Orange Mint theme release and it worked out well.

Attached below is a zip file of my “Black & Blue” Drupal theme. The code is licensed under the GPL so you are free to do with it as you wish. I just ask that you link back to my blog if you make use of it :)

So why not commit this to Drupal as a theme project? Well I have no intentions to maintain it, no desire to extract into a more generic and usable theme, and I have to catch plane to San Francisco in a few. But, if you want to make and extract this into a Drupal project, by all means please do. Enjoy!

Update: version 2 has been released that fixes some bugs and adds new features.

More than a year ago, I released an outgoing links filter (OLF) for Drupal. This module worked well and added a CSS class to outgoing links.

However, I didn’t touch the module for more than a year (it only worked in Drupal 4.7!) and it kind of faded away… until, today!

In keeping current with more widely used lingo, I decided to create an external links filter (ELF) that worked in Drupal 5, had nifty icons, and was all around more robust.

So why is this better than other modules that do this?

I’m pleased to announce that Simplemenu 5.0 has been released. This new release fixes issues with IE6/7, improves compatibility with different themes, and adds some new options for controlling the menu effects and timing.

From the changelog:

• #199224, fix display issues in IE6/7
• #200086, don’t load non-existent custom.css file
• #195972, better default CSS to avoid conflicts with themes
• #199715, remove absolute positioning to improve theme and CSS attaching compatibility
• #199882, new options for controlling menu effects and timing

Download and enjoy!

Well Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

This morning before all the turkey and football I’ve managed to release version 4.0 of SimpleMenu!

This new release includes an upgrade to SuperFish 1.3 (note: 1.3.1+ won’t work since it requies jQuery 1.2 and Drupal 5 only ships with jQuery 1.0), and a complete rewrite of the CSS, fixing a number of issues.

Additionally, you can now choose which theme you want to use to render the menu and/or specify your own. The first new theme is black & blue and is based on Jeremy Caldwell’s design.

Lots of other bugs were fixed too, so check out the release notes for details.

Ok time for some turkey, Happy Thanksgiving all!

That’s right, SimpleFeed, the fastest and easiest to use feed parser for Drupal is finally stable and release worthy!

A few months back (well half a year, but who’s counting, it’s been a busy summer / fall ;-)), I mentioned a release would be soon but didn’t realize it would take so long.

Anyways, here is the run down of the changes since then…