Posts tagged geek

Catching up with the 21st Century.

Sep 23rd

Posted by adam in scripts

No comments

Well, in an half-arsed manner, I’m finally catching up with this century’s gizmo, that most people didn’t believe I didn’t use.

RSS.

I say kinda, ‘cos, despite having finally found something non-intrusive, and with a UI that doesn’t suck, I still don’t check the webpage it makes. Despite it updating.

Of course, I should have thought “I know who would have written something useful” donkey’s years ago. But I never did. Only recently, when hunting for Matilda did I think about it. *sigh*

So, there we have it. Next up is working a fix for it, to handle rss feeds which require basic-auth (trac-tastic!), and getting xkcd to display inline…

Next up: populating it a bit more, and then unsubscribing from some lists… well, maybe filter ‘em out…

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Drupal for NGOs

Jun 11th

Posted by adam in drupal

2 comments

Ah, right, well, yesterday, I made it along to a new meet-up/group, Drupal for NGOs

bloody good turnout, and quite a few people with experience in the field, along with those of us who’ve been playing around, and those thinking about Making The Switch. (like what no2id are to be doing soonish)

I saw on the upcoming comments that someone was after a few notes, so, erm, here are mine…

casestudy 1: greenpeace uk

Greenpeace UK (gpuk) used to use a legacy system of coldfusion, dating from the late 90s, and strove to gain better communications with their supporters, to recruit/engage others (vide: user module, forum). One of the cool things that’s on their site are the context sensitive blocks — targeted ads and stuff. Rock on!

Navigation’s made possible via both menus and tags, making use of the Tagadelic module.

Their local groups functionality draws in data from elsewhere, and as the sign-up process mail goes to the punter and the co-ordinator for that group: useful. Local groups are a specific Content Type.

To tweak some of the text, the locale module’s used

An extensive list of modules were used, the ones in my notes include:

For their data stuff (the idea to link in the Drupal with their supporters database/CRM) is to use SOPERA, something that uses SOAP, and can act (as I understood it) as an intermediary.

For importing stuff, they used a couple of scripts, and then manual tidy-up.

casestudy 2: oxfam international

Migrated from Plone → Drupal (site not yet live)

They use 14 core modules, and 29 custom modules, a few the same as gpuk, but also Custom Breadcrumbs and Lightbox 2

From start to finish, it’s taken them about 6 or 7 months.

In terms of clean-up, i can’t read my notes…

Their press releases, though were structured data, and imported in.

Nightly builds take place from their subversion repo.

For content specific stuff, they’re making use of the Cue node.

Apart from those, there were a couple of other Q&As, some of which focused on large-scale sites/optimization/techy concerns — the idea of PHP optimizers (there’s a blog somewhere comparing versions of PHP & Apache), and running a lightweight httpd were suggested, such as lighthttpd / ergdex. along with something like squid/varnish. Some modules it seems involve onehelluvalot of database queries (250) per load, so for large-scale stuff, re-writing may prove useful.

There are some load sims out there, too.

For proxying, appliancesys.com (hum, maybe I mis-heard) was mentioned as having proven useful

Looks like the start of a London Drupal community, which could be useful…

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