How to Speed up and Optimize Drupal 7

Before we go into the details of techniques and tips to speed up drupal 7, lets understand what slows down drupal.

1. Database queries
2. Loading CSS and Javascript
3. Images which are loaded on your page
4. Loading unwanted modules

Now lets see what are some of the quick things you can do to speed up and optimize.

Configuration changes

1. For an initial, quick performance tuning, see on your site: Administer > Site configuration > Performance

Here you can read the options for page cache, CSS optimization,  JavaScript optimization. That standard optimization and database caching can be enough for many sites.

Check the boxes next to "Cache pages for anonymous users," "Cache blocks," "Compress cached pages," "Aggregate and compress CSS files," and "Aggregate JavaScript files."

Turning off modules

2. Turn off update manager module
3. Turn off any devel modules if you have installed.
4. Turn off overlay module
5. Turn off toolbar module, download and install administration menu module instead.

Likewise you should turn off and remove any modules you are not using, since fast loading site is much more important than adding more functionality which is slow.

Boost Module

6. Enable Boost module. For anonymous users Boost caches your pages  HTML files, so your webserver  can serve them much more quickly as there will be no database reads.  So if majority of traffic is from anonymous users, then Boost is a great module for you.  Boost can help you realize a significant performance increase for personal blogs, small business, corporate sites, portals and directories that receive mostly anonymous traffic. For shared hosting this is your best option in terms of improving performance and enhancing your website visitor's experience.

For statistics you can always use google analytics module.

Advanced Performance Tuning

7. Adding Rule to .htaccess file

If you use the mod_deflate rule, you don't necessarily need to check the "Compress cached pages" checkbox on the Performance settings page.

Rules to be added to the .htaccess file (I add this little block of code to the top of the file, just under the "Apache/PHP/Drupal settings:" comments):

##### Midwestern Mac-recommended additions #####

# Use mod_deflate to gzip components
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript text/plain text/html text/xml application/xml
</IfModule>

# Disable ETags (can help if you're using multiple servers, or use cloud hosting)
# see: http_://www.askapache.com/htaccess/apache-speed-etags.html for more info
FileETag None

################################################

7. Innodb Tuning

Now that Drupal 7 (D7) joins mediawiki and gallery2 in using the Innodb database engine if you use any of these you must consider tuning it too and not just myISAM, or these products will run slower than they should.

Edit /etc/my.cnf and for a small D7 site start by adding the following lines under the [mysqld] section.

# innodb specific
# innodb_buffer_pool_size 50% of memory on 5GB+ server. Set it to be larger than your data size or 500M on 4G box.
innodb_buffer_pool_size=20M
# innodb_log_file_size This depends on your recovery speed needs but 256M seems to be good performance
# innodb_log_buffer_size=4M 4M is good for most large servers
innodb_log_buffer_size = 2M
# innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=2 (1=flush log to disk every transaction, 2=flush to OS Cache, 0=don't flush)
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2

               

Drupal MemCached Integration

Though drupal has built-in cache mechanism, by default, Drupal will save all its caches to database, which means, every time you hit a cache, there will be a database query. This is obviously not the best solutions.

To speed up your site's cache, a better way is use a 3rd party caching system, such as Memcached, and stores all caches in memory. And in this article, we will tell you how to integrate Memcached with drupal.

What's Memcached

Memcached is a distributed memory object caching system which is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an external data source (such as a database or API) must be read. It is now widely used by hundreds of thousands of sites on the internet such as YouTube, Zynga, Facebook and Twitter.

Memcached runs on Unix, Linux Windows and MacOSX and is distributed under a permissive freee software license.

Install Memcached

Memcached is very likely in your source packages, so you can just try:

 sudo yum install memcached

If you want build memcached from source code, remember install libevent first.

 sudo yum install libevent-dev

To verify memcached is installed correctly, run:

 memcached -h

And you'll see the help info for memcached.

After memcached installation completed, you can edit options for memcached to meet your need.

 vi /etc/sysconfig/memcached

There are some common options:

 PORT="11211"
 USER="memcached"
 CACHESIZE="64"    # Max cache size, Unit: MB.
 MAXCONN=”1024″    # Max connection allowed.
 OPTIONS=""

Other options can be seen by:

 memcached -h

If everything is ok, you can now start the memcached service.

 service memcached start

Use the following shell code to test the connectivity:

 echo -e "stats\r" | nc localhost 11211

Install Memcached Extension for PHP

To use memcached in php, you need install the PECL memcache extension for PHP.

 yum install php-pecl-memcached

Edit your php.ini file, make sure the following line in your php.ini

 extension=memcache.so

Restart apache server, access "/admin/reports/status/php" of your drupal site. You'll found a new memcached section.

Install Memcached Module for Drupal

Download "Memcache API and Integration" module from http://drupal.org/project/memcache. Uncompress, and put it at /sites/all/modules/

Add following code to your settings.php(/sites/default)

 $conf = array(
     'cache_inc' => './sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache.inc',
 );

Access your drupal admin page, enable the "Memcache" and "Memcache Admin" module.

Then clear all the cache in "Administration -> Configuration -> Performance" Page.

Till now, the integration is done. Hope you enjoy it.

And you can view the memcached status at Administration -> Reports -> Memcached

Configuring Drupal With Multiple Memcached Instances

If you using more than one memcached server, you should edit the settings.php like this. (/sites/default/). Add something like this.

 $conf = array(
   'cache_inc' => './sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache.inc',
   'memcache_servers' => array(
    // Servers/instances configured here
     'localhost:11211' => 'default',
     'localhost:11212' => 'page',
     'localhost:11213' => 'filter',
   ),
   'memcache_bins' => array(
    // Bins assigned here
     'cache'        => 'default',
     'cache_menu'   => 'default',
     'cache_page'   => 'page',
     'cache_filter' => 'filter',
   ),
 );

What Else

Before deploying Memcache in production, you should find a proper Drupal hosting solution. Normally, shared hosting package is not recommened as MemCache is not installed by default, and you are also not allowed to make the change to the web server. So, we recommend you to get a Cloud hosting or something close, in which you could get the full control of the server.

5 drupal modules to Purge users, Clean-up Spammers and Spam posts

Lets look at some of the options available with drupal modules to control user spam, clean the posts after user have spammed, clean up or Purge unwanted users from drupal website.

1. Ban Unpublish Module

This is probably the best option, since it also integrates with Advanced user module and View Bulk operations module(VBO).

The Ban and Unpublish module makes it easier to clean up after registered spammers and other problem users by implementing a bulk operation that appears at Home > Administer > User management > Users.

This module adds a single drop-down option to the list page that performs the following in a single pass:

• Ban the user's email address.
• Ban the username.
• Block the account.
• Kick the user off the server, if active.
• Unpublish any nodes that were published by the user.
• Unpublish any comments that were published by the user

As mentioned before the above operations will be added to VBO and Advanced user module for doing more bulk operations

2. Country wise banning of spammers

Country Ban can be used to set entire countries to "read only" or to ban their access completely. Setting a country to "read only" disables all account access for that region, automatically logging out any user which resides there and preventing new accounts from being generated. Websites set to 'read only' will still be able to be viewed anonymously. The website admin may also set a "complete ban", which will block the website entirely for all users of the configured region.

Country Ban is dependent upon IP-based Determination of a Visitor's Country as well as Country Codes API. These modules provide the country of origin that Country Ban requires to filter properly.

3. Advanced user Module

The advanced user module's main job is to allow additional filtering which is not possible with the inbuilt drupal user module. Once you have filtered the users, you can do operations like

1. Mass emailing
2. Blocking
3. Unblocking
4. Deleting

It allows filtering of users based on the user.module fields and optionally the profile.module fields. The fields available for filtering can be configured using the module settings. Eg. Site admin may search through 1000s of users to display all users who have not accessed their account.

• Filtering of users based on:

1. Permissions
2. Status
3. Created
4. Accessed
5. Email
6. User Id
7. Admin Selected Profile Fields

• Filtering on fields can be grained to

1. Is Equal To
2. Is Not Equal To
3. Is Less Than
4. Is Greater Than
5. Is Less Than or Equal To
6. Is Greater Than or Equal To
7. Contains
8. Does Not Contain
9. Begins With
10. Ends With

• Multiple filters can be refined to be AND or OR operations giving you the greatest control of the data selections.
• Administrative options include notification of user data changes.The notification emails include:
• • User's email address
  • A link to google and yahoo searches for user's email address - great for doing a quick spammer check on the user's email address.

4. Prevent spammers from registering - Spambot

Spambot protects the user registration form from spammers and spambots by verifying registration attempts against the Stop Forum Spam (www.stopforumspam.com) online database. It also adds some useful features to help deal with spam accounts.

This module works well for sites which require user registration before posting is allowed (which is most forums).

• Checks (username, email, ip address) data against the www.stopforumspam.com blacklist. Blacklisting can be based on either of email, username or IP address (with configurable thresholds).
• Bulk reporting of users as spammers.
• Scanning of existing user accounts (via cron).
• New 'spam' tab for user accounts with some useful information and actions.
• Uses IP addresses from core statistics and User Stats if they are enabled.
• Optional auto-reporting of blacklisted registration attempts to www.stopforumspam.com

If you need more IP address statistics of your users, please consider the User Stats module

Conclusion

Install Ban Unpublish, VBO, Advanced user modules and you should be able to do most of the operations around spam control including banning users, removing spam posts, purging spammers etc. If you still face heavy spam install Country Ban Module to restrict users from a particular geography. And yes do install spambot if your website has heavy traffic. Sometimes legitimate users may also be blocked by Spambot so be careful.

Stopping spam in Drupal – Users, Posts, Comments

One of the most common problems faced by many drupal sites is tons of spam, There are either spam users or spam content or spam comments. There are all sort of nasty things that happen by spammers and it is a huge risk to the website’s credibility and growth. Read on for detailed analysis and recommendations on preventing spam

I personally would not visit a forum again if the content is unmoderated and spam. So how do you avoid the spam. There are three methods

Automatically

                Install modules or write code that block the spam users, comments and content For example there isspam.module which uses Bayesian logic to filter content, or Akismet which sends the content to the Akismet for checking via several tests, Akismet is known to be the best method so far for preventing comment spam. Another method is  Bad Behavior which looks for spammer-like activity and blocks those users. The issue with this method is that sometimes genuine users also get blocked thereby creating a negative spiral.

Setup for these types of solutions needs some work and  they can slow your site down considerably depending on the amount of spam that you get and the power of your server.

Challenging Users

These includes turing tests like captcha.module which presents a math problem or "numbers embedded in an image, or KittenAuth - the cute alternative, you're presented 5 images of animals and you pick the kitty. There's also things you can do in comment.module setup like requiring contact information, or requiring previews.

Catchpa Riddler module will let you ask custom questions to the users  during registration and if they answer correctly  they are allowed in. This very useful for niche sites since the spammers will not know answer to simple question related to your website’s domain.

Administrators prevent spam

This will require work, but if your site has less traffic this is the most effective way. You can either  disallow commenting without approval in admin/access and/or something like Comment Mail which sends an email with approve/deny links to the admin every time a comment is submitted. Or you could have an army of content moderators to delete spam when they find it.

Likewise you can disallow any registration without administration approval.

The main advantage of this method is there are 100% results however the delay in getting approvals may turn down people.

I generally check the user credentials during registration and only allow them to register if they have entered all profile fields. THis method will cut down 95% of spammers. Looking at Profile fields during registration you will deny a whole lot of people. Then I moderate content every 12 to 24 hours and delete spam comments and posts and block the user. This method works for my niche sites very well.

So what is the best way to prevent drupal spam? Well there is no single answer. Based on your problems you will have to select the best answer. It depends on your spam volume, whether you want to block bots or unwanted users, and how much time you can devote to website moderation.

1. Mollom which is developed by drupal founder is still not mature enough to be used, there are downtimes and sluggisness in response which plague them for now.
2. Spamcide – Adds a hidden field to forms that only spam-bots will see and fill in. But this will not work for human spammers
3. Spambot - Checks member details against the Stop Forum Spam system. An effective method but will not work for  anonymous posts. So to use this you will have to stop anonymous posting and also be prepared

To me it seems like Bad Behaviour module and Akismet should work for most  users and would be the best option to prevent spam

Note:
If you enable CAPTCHA module, it disables page caching. So if you have comments form at bottom of each page then the page will not be cached. So every page will be treated as if the user has logged in and it will incur a query to database. Do the following to open comments form on new page.
1) go to admin/content/types
2) Click the edit link for the page, blog entry, or other type you want to modify
3) Scroll down to Comment Settings
4) Find "Location of Comment Submission Form"
5) Select the "Display on separate page" option
6) Click Save Content Type

At times the CAPTCHA module does not work effectively, if that is the case use reCAPTCHA module. It is very effective and simple to install and use. The reCAPTCHA module uses the reCAPTCHA web service to improve the CAPTCHA system and protect email addresses. Just get your public and private keys from recaptcha site and plug it in your site.

Crafting an Apache Solr Schema.xml

Using Apache Solr with Drupal is fairly simple thanks to the apachesolr module, but recently we were tasked with making Solr a vital component of a custom Django project. The Drupal module comes with a Solr schema.xml that is already set up specifically to play nice with Drupal, but we had to craft our own. Setting up Solr, filling it with data, and getting it back out again is relatively easy. However, much like taking a north-Philly street brawler and turning him into Rocky, it takes a bit of work to do it well.

Possibly the single most important factor in successfully creating a custom Solr schema is how well you know the data. This is where a slight bit of artisanship comes into play. To be as efficient as possible the schema has to reflect not just the data types, but where the data needs to go and how it is going to be used on a field by field basis.

Anytime that I move data from one point to another, I always take some time to plot out all of the data that I start out with, and were exactly it needs to go. In this case, not just where it needs to go in Solr, but where and how it will be used by viewers of the final site. Only after I have answered those questions do I start thinking about the mapping and how to get it there. For simple one-to-one migrations of data, that process might get you most of the way there, but with Solr you need to be mindful of many other factors.

What is the schema.xml file?

The Solr schema.xml (typically found in the solr/conf/ directory) is where you tell Solr what types of fields you plan to support, how those types will be analyzed, and what fields you are going to make available for import and queries. Solr will then base its Lucene underbelly on what you define. After installation you will have a generic example schema.xml that I highly recommend you read through and even use as a foundation of your own schema. It can be tempting to glaze over large block comments in an example file, but you will find great examples, explanations, and even some solid performance and tuning tips all through the file. It is definitely worth the time to read it over before you set up camp and make it your own.

Field Types, Fields, and Copy Fields

The big picture of the file really breaks down to three major areas. First you define your field types to dictate which Solr java class the field type utilizes and how fields of this type will be analyzed. This is where most of the "magic" is outlined in your schema.

Then you define your actual fields. A field has a name attribute which is what you will use when importing and querying your data, and it points back to a designated field type. This is where you tell Solr what data is indexed, and what data is stored.

Optionally you may choose to have some copy fields which can be used tointercept incoming data going to one field and fork a clone of it off to another field that is free to be a different field type.

You do not have to index and store it all

A concept in Solr that you do not want to miss out on is that not everything has to be indexed and not everything has to be stored. Solr takes a dual path with data, keeping what is indexed completely separate from what is stored. When you think about the complex operations that Solr does on your data to dissect, convert, and if you say so - even turn it backwards in order to make it indexable, it makes sense that you would not be able to turn around and reuse that same data to display back to the viewer. So now you have two fundamental questions to ask yourself on each field:

1. Will this field need to be searched against?
2. Will this field need to be presented to the viewer?

The answers to these questions are directly reflected in the indexed and stored attributes to your field elements. These days even terabytes are relatively cheap, but performance is still priceless. If Solr doesn't need it, don't make it wade through it to get what it does need.

Analyzers, Tokenizers, and Token Filters: know 'em - love 'em

Much of the power of Solr comes from the field types that you define and what combination of char filters, tokenizers, and token filters you use against your data. When you set up a field type you can define one shared analyzer or one for the index, and a completely different one for query results.

Within your analyzer(s) you can start out with char filters. A char filter will modify your data in some way before it is actually analyzed. A good example would be the PatternReplaceCharFilterFactory which can apply a regular expression find/replace on your data before Solr even starts to break it apart.

Each analyzer can have one tokenizer. Which one you use will depend heavily on the data you intend to pass through it. Think of this as the fundamental way that you want the analysis of the data to be approached. From there you can also apply token filters to further manipulate your data. Examples would be referencing a stop words list, applying a list of synonyms, or forcing all characters to lowercase.

Because index and storage are separate, they can be analyzed separately

A great example of this would be if you were going to index and store a document that had plenty of content, but also thick with html markup. When you index that data you want to make sure the mark up is not getting indexed, otherwise things like class names might give you false positives down the road. However when you go to serve up the content to the viewer you are going to want that html intact. Solr can handle this by allowing you to define a field type where the index analyzer uses the HTMLStripCharFilterFactory char filter to purge out all html entities prior to tokenization, but the query analyzer would not use the char filter and instead present the originally stored content in search results.

Dynamic fields are rad, but specifically defined fields are rad²

The most common usage of dynamic fields is to allow your scripts to pass in data with a suffix like "_s" (example: address_s) and then Solr will process whatever you pass as a string. This comes in handy when you have data structures that may change over time and you want to allow your scripts to handle this gracefully without coder intervention on either the scripts or the schema. The Drupal module makes heavy and clever use of this feature. The two downsides are that typically your dynamic fields are going to be have more generalized tokenizers and filters applied and they are most likely going to index and store everything in order to play friendly with any data you throw at it. Whenever possible I would recommend defining specific fields for any data that is going to carry significant weight in your indexing or queries. This will allow you to get much more granular with how that data is processed.

Why send twice when you can copyField

If you need the same field to be indexed or stored in more than one way, there is no need to modify your scripts to send the same field twice. Just utilize the copy field feature of Solr. Another useful trick is to use copy fields to combine multiple fields into one indexable field. This can greatly simply running queries.

Where to start and where to find more

If you have not installed Solr yet, you can find the download and install documentation here: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/downloads.html.

If you are just experimenting you can get by running from the Jetty Java servlet container that comes with the download. But for production and serious development you will want to upgrade to something with a little more muscle likeApache Tomcat to dish out your Solr needs.

If this is your first time working with Solr I would recommend spending some time just experimenting with the solr/admin/ interface. A lot can be learned from pushing in some of the example xml files and testing out some queries. This is also a great place to test out your latest field type concoctions.

Some great documentation is provided on some of the most common tokenizers and filters in the apache.org wiki. If those do not meet all of your needs you can also find plenty of others out in the wild. For example, we needed a geo hash that could handle multiple values on a field, so we tracked down and used an alternative for the single value one that comes with Solr.

You will find a lot of material and concepts at play and the best way to find your bearings is to just dive in. When in doubt, push some data, query it, refine the schema as needed.

Deleting / Purging Cache, Users, Nodes, Comments (Housekeeping)

If you have developed a drupal site and are maintaining it too, you will soon find that your database will keep growing with lot of unwanted posts, comments and user registrations. There is a need to purge this data from time to time to keep storage levels at optimum and also your website updated with only relevant content.

I was looking at what could be the different ways in which you can clear data / Purge data in drupal.  I have logically divided it into 4 categories

1. Purging Cache
2. Purging Users
3. Purging Comments
4. Purging posts

Lets look at each one of them

1. Cache actions provides rules actions for clearing drupal caches. It currently provides actions for:

• Clearing Drupal cache bins
• Clearing CSS/JS cache
• Clearing The cache of specific views
• Clearing The cache of specific panel pages
• Clearing The cache of specific mini panels

2. The Cleaner module allows the admin to set a schedule for clearing caches, watchdog, and old sessions. Its available only for Drupal 5 and Drupal 6

There are functions in Drupal which will cause "expired" entries in some cache tables to be deleted. This is vastly improved in Drupal 6. "Minimum_cache_lifetime" is a partial solution, but still not totally complete.  There are still times and/or cache tables that don't get cleared in any of those scenarios. Many sites will not be impacted by this, but a few will (just search on drupal.org and you will see many posts from people having problems).

3. Also refer to this documentation on clearing cache
4. The LoginToboggan module offers several modifications of the Drupal login system in an external module by offering the following features and usability improvements: Optionally have unvalidated users purged from the system at a pre-defined interval (please read the CAVEATS section of INSTALL.txt for important information on configuring this feature!).
5. The inactive_user module provides Drupal administrators with a way to automatically manage inactive user accounts. This module has two goals: to help keep users coming back to your site by reminding them when they've been away for a configurable period of time, and to cleanup unused accounts.
6. User Prune lets you mass delete inactive users based on criteria you specify.

The module classifies inactive users into two categories: users who have never logged in before, and users who have logged in at least once. For users that have never logged in before, you can choose to prune users based on how long they've been registered. For users that have logged in before, you can chose to prune users based on both how long they've been registered, and how long its been since they last logged in. The pruning specification you select can be saved as a cron job, or executed a single time.

7. Deleting nodes at the database level is a bad idea because there are so many tables in the database that contain node-related data. If deleting nodes in bulk at admin/content/node is not adequate for your needs then you need to make use of the node delete api function. Example usage to delete page type nodes.

$node_type = 'page';

  

//fetch the nodes we want to delete

$result = db_query("SELECT nid FROM {node} WHERE type='%s'",$node_type);

while ($row = db_fetch_object($result)){

  node_delete($row->nid);

  $deleted_count+=1;

}

//simple debug message so we can see what had been deleted.

drupal_set_message("$deleted_count nodes have been deleted");

9. To delete duplicate nodes  refer to this code snippet
10. Deleting Comments – If you have to delete specific comments or spam comments you can use views bulk operations to mass delete comments Install the views bulk operations module, create a page view of comments, and choose "Bulk Operations" as the view style. Make sure you select "Delete comment" as one of the selected operations. When you view the view page you created, you'll be able to bulk delete comments.
11. Deleting nodes can be done using Views bulk operations module in the same way as above.

Which is a best webhosting for Drupal

I know web hosting is so unreliable these days. Its full of made up promises with fine prints.  Unlimited space - is a hype. It's a marketing gimmick. Don't fall for it!Sometimes it's  difficult to find good web hosts with great support.

So how do you find a  web host company which can best support your drupal website, Such that whenever there is a problem, someone can solve it quickly.

Drupal will need PHP and MySQL support This common setup is better known as LAMP(linux, apache, mysql, php) is themost economical and stable solution. In addition you would need a good user interface for control panel, like cpanel. First of all, lets check what are the additional features you would need in a drupal host compared to normal websites, these will be useful if you are planning for high end website

1. memcache, it is a high-performance memory object caching system. It will  speed up database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM. This is very effective in managing the load on your database, which for most web applications including Drupal, is the biggest performance bottleneck and risk to scalability.
2. APC, which stands for Alternative PHP Cache, is a free PHP extension that will optimize the performance of PHP applications by caching PHP code in a compiled state. Check if the host has this.
3. When a proxy, like Squid, is configured as a reverse proxy it can act as a caching mechanism for web pages. Because the reverse proxy sits between the internet and the webserver, it can intercept all requests and respond to them by serving cached content. This reduces the load on the webserver (and the database).
4. FastCGI and mod_php are two of the most commonly used approaches. Most people are using mod_phpbecause that is the default on nearly all Linux distributions. FastCGI is often used on shared hosts to provide additional security, but has performance hit.  So choose if you want better performance (mod_php) or most security ( FastCGI)
5. Varnish is a HTTP accelerator that caches web pages for future use. Its mainly for anonymous users
6. Apache Solr is a search platform that uses a variety of features to speed up complicated databases queries. While Solr can drastically reduce the amount of time required for queries in large pools of data, it should only be applied for sites where the increased memory usage doesn't outweigh the benefits.
7. Security – A generic requirement is that it should support SFTP file transfers and SSL for secure data transfers.

In conclusion, if you are looking for shared hosting and something which is good for your pocket, then you may not get good performance, security or customer support. Having said that , there are good shared hosting providers for Drupal. If you are looking to host professional and high end sites, then its better you select from above list of features, in addition to the standard features provided by webhosting. Drupal is a powerful CMS and if the hardware or hosting supports it well then it can really do wonders for you. Fast websites are still in fashion and will continue to outsmart the slower alternatives.

Use CDN jQuery for your Drupal theme

Simple code to use jQuery from Google CDN. Change the version "1.8.0" to your preferred version.
You can also switch to use Microsoft CDN, or other sources by changing the jQuery path below.

/**
* Implements hook_js_alter().
*/
function YOUR_THEME_js_alter(&$js) {
  if (isset($js['misc/jquery.js'])) {
    $jquery_path ='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.0/jquery.min.js';
    $js['misc/jquery.js']['data'] = $jquery_path;
    $js['misc/jquery.js']['version'] = '1.8.0';
    $js['misc/jquery.js']['type'] = 'external';
  }
}

This code may conflict with jQuery Update module.

Fusion Accelerator and Drupal 7

Moving into Drupal 7 territory

Fusion is making serious headway into Drupal 7! After many months of working with Drupal 7 and Skinr, the decision was made to create a skin tool for Fusion itself, and we brought the tool in house. We could not ask our customers to wait any longer.

Fusion themes are now dependent on the Fusion Accelerator module. Fusion Accelerator includes a fork of Skinr called Fusion Apply. It also includes other features such as a grid tool for themers to use to easily create new Fusion ready grids. The Fusion Apply Rules module allows you to quickly create rulesets for the application of your skins to different pages and regions of your site.

If you’re already using Fusion and Skinr, we’ve written some documentation on updating your current theme. You can see many of these items in our documentation here:Getting Started with Fusion Apply and here: Creating Fusion Apply Styles.

If you’re already using a Fusion sub-theme for Drupal 7, you should also see our general upgrade documentation here, and if you’re using Drupal 6 and want to move all the way to our lastest versions, then Converting Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 themes is the place to go.

Theme updates?

We’re working hard to update our themes as quickly as possible. We’ve got one all new premium theme for Drupal 7, and two updated themes, as well as updates for Fusion Core and Acquia Marina. If you already own a Fusion theme, you’ll receive an email when your theme is updated. Look for a post on our Drupal Commerce based themes, coming soon!

Anything else?

You bet! If you’re interested in responsive theming, have a look at Fusion’s development release on Drupal.org. That’s right, we’re adding responsive features into Fusion! We’re very excited to be doing this, so keep an eye on us for more information on this too!

Updating Drupal

Today I shall show you how to upgrade your Drupal web application to latest stable version.

It is strongly recommended that you always keep your Drupal site up to date with the very latest minor release available, to remove known security vulnerabilities and existing bugs.

How to find out that our Drupal site needed to be updated?

Well, it’s quite simple. Your Drupal installation is smart and notifies you about the new version available at Drupal.org. All you need to do is to check the status report of your Drupal application.

To check STARUS REPORT login as Super User ( the user uame you selected during installation).

Then go to Administer-Reports-Status report.

If your Drupal installation is not upto date then you would notice some alerts like the following

You can notice the current version of Drupal is 6.16 and Drupal is showing that it’s not secure to continue with this installation. Further, it is also indicating the version needed to installed, in this case the most recent version is 6.20.

Backing up the current installation

The first thing we need to do before patching Drupal is to take the site off-line. It’s a Drupal utility. You can find this utility under site configuration - site maintenance. Now select off-line button and save configuration. You have to login as a super-user to do so. This is a cool feature of Drupal which shows a message to the visitors that the site is currently under maintenance. For some reason if you need to log out of your Drupal site during patching you can always log back in. To do so write your domain name and then put /user (e.g. www.example.com/user).

It is very important backup the database because should anything go wrong with the database while you are patching Drupal or even modules you can always turn back to your old database.  There are several ways to back up the database; I am going to use the most common tool available i.e. phpmyadmin. So, you first have to login to your webhosting control panel.  Then go to phpmyadmin utility.

Select the database you wish to backup

(I am using the picture of a live site that is way I have hidden the name of the database for security reason.)

Click on the Export utility.

Now, scroll down to the bottom and save the file out as a default SQL file

We have completed the second step. Now it’s time to backup our additional resources such as custom configuration file, contributed modules and themes, and site's uploaded files. If other files have modifications, such as .htaccess or robots.txt, back those up as well.

Drupal keeps all the custom user configuration and files in a directory called “sites”. So, if we simply copy this directory and keep it in a safe place we are good to go ahead and patch our Drupal installation.

We are done with the archiving of our Drupal site. It’s time to move forward and start the upgrading process.

1. Download the latest and stable Drupal version from Drupal.org. In our case it’s Drupal 6.20.

2. Unpack the new Drupal version in your local computer.

3. Fire up your favorite ftp client, I am using filezilla, and login to your ftp account.

4. Upload all the files and folders to your Drupal installation directory except for sites directory, .htaccess and robots.txt file. [This step is very critical so do it carefully.]

5. We have performed all necessary steps to upgrade our Drupal installation. Now it’s time to check whether our patching was successful or not.

6. To check that head over to the Reports-status report and examine.

7. You would notice that when status reports loads it recognize now that we have Drupal 6.20. That means we have upgraded our Drupal installation successfully.

8. Now run update_0.php by visiting e.g., http://www.example.com/update.php (replace  www.example.com with your Drupal installation's domain name and path). This step will update the core database schema to the new Drupal installation.

9. Drupal would prompt you now to follow these instruction of the above image. We have already done these during archiving of our installation. So, you can move forward and continue.

10. Last thing we would want to do is to take our site online. For that, we would go to site maintenance-select online and save configuration.

Well that’s all. You seem to have successfully updated your Drupal core.

Drupal Content Related tips and Tricks

17. Showing similar or related content in the block to improve stickiness

It’s a common feature in CMS to show a block of related content items or similar content. This interests the user as he can read similar entries on your website and stay longer on the website. It will also increase the chances of your website being bookmarked.

There are many modules available , you can see a Comparison of Similar / Relevant content block modules, But I would recommend you use this simple option of showing relevant content block using views module you can find the article here.

Using Views 2 and Drupal 6 to Create a Related Pages Block make sure you read the comments on the page as the solution itself is slightly old.

For drupal 6 sites there is another module available which can do similar function which is Taxonomy Quick Find . It has more configurations like you can configure each block to only show individual node types (eg, one block for page and a completely separate block for blogs) and Each node type on each block can also have its own limit

18. Slide show of your content

Generally the homepage of a website would have slide show of the latest items or important nodes / images you want to highlight. This can be achieved in many ways. Usually people may think jquery plugins but the best way to do this in Drupal is to go for views slideshow module.

You could rotate entire nodes, categories, image galleries, etc Its also a great space saver. Places where you had multiple images or multiple items such as RSS feeds or category listings can now be presented in a slideshow >>> Views Slideshow

Views Slideshow has many features and has lot of supporting modules too. Read the module page properly. It even has links to external articles which are very good.

19. How to use images in drupal

A common confusion is how to add the image support to drupal. There are so many modules and snippets,which one would be the best ? What do most people use ?As a newbie you may have these FAQs in mind.One another thing I wonder is should I host my images remotely on Flickr , Picassa or should I keep it local.Check out this article which will help you.Drupal Image support for Nodes. If you are planning to use Flickr then you can check out Drupal and Flickr Integration

20. Don’t need the body field ? .

As you know each content type be it story , page or new CCK content type has a body field , If you don’t want it , you will have to create a new CCK content type, then Goto administer › Content management > Content types and Edit the type you want, erase the label 'Body'. Using a blank label will remove the field.

21. Converting  nodes from  one type to another.

Often we create content types and then we realize that its difficult to manage so many content types and wish we had created fewer types. Or simply you want to convert from one node type to another.  Node Convert  adds a menu tab "Convert" on the node view page, i.e. node/1/convert, which gives the ability of converting the node from its current node type to another node type. Also it gives the ability of transfering all the custom CCK field values of the current node type to the destination CCK fields, or discard them

22. Using Drupal forums - The forum module of drupal is very basic and when compared
    to other forums softwares like vbulletin or simple machines it lacks features & functionality . Question is why would you use drupal forums.? I would say
    that if you want a basic mechanism for discussion and don't anticipate a huge
    group of users, then you can go with inbuild forum module as it fast and easy
    to maintain. If you install a third party module like vbDrupal or Simple
    machines integration then may have to wait for upgrades if you are not a
    developer.  Also you are at the mercy of the free support offered by the community if you have any issues with the modules.  Read this postDrupal Forums – Enhance, Integrate and get Inspirations.

23. Site Search - I personally don’t like Google site search. Drupal search results is much better. You can use Porter stemmer module to improve your search effectiveness. This module implements the Porter stemming algorithm to improve English-language searching with the Drupal built-in Search module. The process of stemming reduces each word in the search index to its basic root or stem (e.g. 'blogging' to 'blog') so that variations on a word ('blogs', 'blogger', 'blogging', 'blog') are considered equivalent when searching. This generally results in more relevant search results.  You can also use  views + views_fastsearch to build "section search" or custom advanced search pages for your drupal website.

24. Large files (audio) - If you are using audio module in drupal there is a limit to size of audio files which can be uploaded. After much research I have found that the following can be used to increase the filesize limit of audio files.  and also to bulk upload your audio's