LSNet is now supporting Drupal 6.x. It is early in the "module" season meaning many of the modules available for 5.x are not available for 6.x and many of the modules for 6.x are either in alpha, beta or HEAD (current development snapshot).

For people getting started in Drupal, 6.x may be a good choice. It takes some time to assimilate each module and more are becoming available each day. For those with dependence on specific modules, e.g. ecommerce, stick with 5.x.

We have established a "reference" site http://drupal6.ls.net/ to monitor developments and try out features as they become available.

The first session was attended by five people and culminated in the creation or augmentation of four websites.

• Starbuck the Flying Goat - http://starbuck.net/
• Wolfe Serevices - http://wolfeservices.net/
• N4ZDA - http://n4zda.org/
• Celina Bonita - http://celinabonita.com/

Starbuck benefited from a previous session and a commitment to publish weekly. Incremental progress bears fruit over time and a distance learning course is now in preparation.

Wolfe Services revived a previous website. Stephen has been posting to the LSNet page - regularly and seems to appreciate the company.

N4ZDA realized that one can contribute to one's own website with Drupal and is looking forward to a revival of the dreams he had in college.

Celina Bonita is bent on building a family website and has dreams of developing a commercial website in the future.

Most of us, including me, have modest Drupal sites.

I got to wondering where are the scaling points of Drupal. It seems that modest PC hardware and Drupal services up to around 50,000 visits/day. More than that would be an excellent problem to have!

It is suggested that for those with moderate amounts of money, one should stay on one machine and buy better gear. A major site runs upwards of 180,000 views/day on Mid size iron without a PHP accelerator: 1 quad core xeon, 2Gb ram, disk type unknown.

Somewhere above 50,000 views/day apparently one should think about scaling out. I loved the Scaling Drupal article. It shows how to go from one box, to two web servers, two webservers and two database servers ... etc.

enjoy!

reference:
How much server do I need:
http://drupal.org/node/87868#comment-160984
5-6 million page views a month:
http://drupal.org/node/88143

A recent fascination with schedules led me to the Drupal calendar module. In principle, using the module is simple. Suddenly, however, I found myself immersed in the world of Views and revisiting the Content Construction Kit (CCK).

A joyful AHAH moment arrived earlier than expected. The calendar module has dependencies, understandably, with the Date API (included with CCK); a view must be configured to provide a suitable rendering of date-enhanced content types. This last detail (date-enhanced) is critical for displaying events in a calendar.

A note to those interested in Drupal.

I have been reading "Drupal Creating Blogs, forums, portals, and community Websites" by David Mercer and Packt press. The Drupal Camp at LS.net helped "put meat on the bones" of the topic. Drupal makes more sense now.

The books is available from Amazon and many other fine places.
link to amazon:
Drupal Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites

Before contributing, authors must gain permission to add content. While by design or defect some locations do not restrict contribution, most intelligence collects from credentialed authors. In other words, authors must be registered participants with validated access. In the Drupal environment, registered participants are users; a validated access is called a session.

LSNet will host an open multi-cultural multi-lingual gathering to promote popular participation in the World Wide Web through content management technology (Drupal).

Participants will learn how to:

    * post announcements of community events
    * publish photographs of community interest
    * write a blog - online diary
    * write news stories about community issues
    * build community websites
    * ...

The event is sponsored by LSNet at 115 1/2 W Grayson Street, Galax, VA. Doors will open at 10:00 AM. Snacks provided. People should bring their laptops but can share one of a number of workstations. A $35 donation is suggested but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

For more information email webmaster@ls.net or visit http://ls.net/node/471

Jim Tarvid

All aspiring webmasters with a keyboard like to think of themselves as "professionals". http://vekon.com is about a professional consultant not about a professional webmaster.

The content is all about the owner of the website not the people implementing it. In this case, Rob Varley has written dozens of articles about the economics of international development. His portfolio is best rendered, in large part, as a bibliography. His interests are best served when individual citations can be downloaded and incorporated into new articles. The greater the number of references, the better search position. Better search position leads to more retainer possibilities at better rates.

So how did we do it?

Those who are starting to explore diagrams, organization charts, flow charts etc. would do well to start here. Graphviz does lots of tricks but the simplest is the directed acyclic graph or DAG. Before you run away, a directed graph at its simplest relates two "things" such that one leads to another, e.g. a->b or a leads to b. Think "flipping the switch turns on the light". The part of Graphviz that takes the left side leads to the right side statements is called "dot". Pretend you are Aristotle expounding on causation or a preacher drawing the creation process from Genesis.

LSNet engineers and partners have thousands of hours of practical experience deploying Drupal websites. We are ready to work out a distribution of effort and cooperation which minimizes both deployment time and budget. Look over this checklist, identify the areas you want to do and the help you need, set an initial and recurring budget, send it to us webmaster@ls.net and we will get back to you within 24 hours.

As expected, the script kiddies are banging any site which allows user input in an attempt to publish noxious content. As a counter  measure, we have implemented "captcha".  Theoretically, captcha will help our code distinguish between what humans type and scripts generate, frustrating the latter.

The current scheme employs a simple math question and rumor has it, some scripts have circumvented this scheme. That means, we may have to escalate the techniqueue; alternativs include an audio hint such as a rap singer doing "mother" (or maybe Pink Floyd?).

On the other hand, we may be able to reduce invasiveness by letting authenticated users off the hook.