site

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is quoted by the mainstream media all the time, such is the impact of the studies and publications it funds, produces and reports on. But what's exciting for me personally is that the new site we built for them appeared in a video on Comment is Free, the Guardian's blog-like offshoot.

Blink at around 1m05 and you'll probably miss it, but it's good to see that staff at CiF thought our redesign sufficiently visually engaging to actually put in a video. I suppose if it's a choice between us and Polly Toynbee.... Joking, Polly: please put me in your next film.

A New Year's present from Dries Buytaert:

It didn't take long for us to realize that people wanted more than Acquia Drupal: they wanted support for everything Drupal 6.x -- all modules, themes and custom code. The good news is that Acquia is a nimble company so the last weeks we worked on changing our support model to address customer demands. Starting tomorrow, we will support everything Drupal 6.x -- not just Acquia Drupal but all modules and themes available on drupal.org as well as custom code. I'm still a firm believer in Drupal distributions so Acquia Drupal still has a role as a packaged on-ramp for people getting started with Drupal. However, anyone will be able to connect any Drupal 6.x site to the Acquia Network.

My parents-in-law own a cottage in a place in France called Pont Camarel. They asked me to build them a site. I did. That’s it.

(It’s maintained by the creaky old php-update system, which is awful; development of the site wasn’t helped by the system’s maintainer taking all the old forums down while he rebuilt it and called it a silly name. I don’t blame him, though, as I had to debug it occasionally and by gum if I’d had the time I’d have rebuilt it.)

Coming to the end of the Drupal project on which I’m currently working, I spotted someone else’s brand new site on drupal.org: TeamSugar.

The hallmark of a good frameworked site is that it’s not easy to guess which framework was used, and TeamSugar manages that admirably. While I can’t really comment on the design—I find most networking sites pretty busy, and this is no exception—it certainly feels like a lot of hard work is distancing the user experience from the limitations of the framework, and that’s admirable from a usability perspective. The fewer visitors jumping through hoops to indulge the whims of your CMS the better.

There are a couple of interesting observations in that thread, mostly because they’re guarded criticism coming from an otherwise happy user of the framework:

… We have four app servers now, I believe, and a dedicated database server. We have also extensively edited the code. The architecture of drupal, unfortunately, lends itself to doing things like issuing one query per module per node on a page. For our 8 content sites this isn’t too bad because they’re easily cached and don’t make use of many modules. For TeamSugar it’s much worse because each feature generally requires at least one module. We cache where we can and refactor code elsewhere…. [link to 1971521]

… When you’re creating web applications you’re typically going for one of three things: speed/scalability, flexibility, or maintainability. Drupal is high on flexibility, average on maintainability, and poor on speed, in my opinion. If your priority is maintainability then I’d go for one of the RAD environments like Rails or CakePHP. If speed is your priority then I’d write your own lightweight framework, or whatever, and do it yourself…. [link to 198497]