Answer for: What else could Modwest do to help its clients succeed?
#13 better support for Drupal
I installed Drupal onto the back end of my website United Parish. Unfortunately the URL's look horrible when I run Drupal, and I cannot run the "Clean URL's" function because your database does not support it. I had to move that portion of my website to another host.
I like you guys, and I really like your tech support. This is one of those things that I really need tho.
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unitedparish, if you haven't already, I encourage you to open a ticket with Modwest Support in case there's something we can do to help.
Though I'm not specifically familiar with Drupal, most 'clean URL' functions use Apache's mod_rewrite functionality, which we support. An example is described here:
http://www.modwest.com/help/kb5-337.html
If you like, you can open a ticket with specifics here:
http://my.modwest.com/asksupport.phtml
I dabbled in Drupal a while back on a shared hosting plan at a previous host and found it very easy to add modules and exceed the allowed resources. When that happened, errors would on occasion mislead me into thinking there was something wrong with the database.
I quickly concluded that Drupal is not well suited to shared hosting (if that's what you are using) and would advise keeping a seperate admin session open so you can undo administrative changes that take a walk on the wild side.
Just curious - what resources was Drupal exceeding at that previous host?
Can't recall specifics exactly, but memory, connection, and cpu.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:drupal.org%20resource%20hungry
Got it. Most of the big CMSes (Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress) are pretty demanding, and we often counsel customers to be on the lookout for caching options (such as Wordpress' http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cache/ ).
Just this week we helped a customer who was trying to upgrade Drupal and running into memory limits on our shared system. So, we developed a new 'Memory Boost' add-on, which I think will solve the problem for him and others. I'll post to the blog about it in the next week or two.
A few tips to make Drupal work well on Modwest shared hosting...
- Run your database on MySQL 5+ - db1.modwest.com.
- Use PHP 5.x - enable the XML extension if you see undefined function errors.
- Increase your PHP memory limit to the maximum of 48MB. Without this you'll get white screens. If you still get white screens and memory allocation failures in the error log at '/var/log', shared hosting may not be right for your site.
- Enable only the required modules. Each one uses more memory.
- Set the "BaseUrl" setting to "/", even if you're installing directly into "htdocs"
- After doing the above steps, enable clean URLs. They are not enabled by default. This removes the "?q=something" part.
- Turn on caching. This reduces anonymous requests to just a couple of database queries rather than hundreds.
John, is Memory Boost available now, or will that come with PHP 5.2x in the coming months?
Great advice about the reducing the number of modules, and enabling caching. Wordpress also has a caching extension that greatly improves its performance.
Yes - Memory Boost is available now. It provides an extra 32MB for $5/month, and up to two may be added per account. The extra fee is waived for Power and Power Plus accounts. This info will go on the website and blog... soon-ish.
That's very helpful advice.
Some modules require others and it's easy to get carried away like a kid in a sweet shop until you see your first white screen where it all starts to unfold.
Here's a list of what I was using (30) modules when I encountered problems in a shared hosting. As you can see there isn't much in the way of extravagance.
aggregator
block
blog
blogapi
book
color
comment
contact
drupal
filter
forum
front
help
legacy
locale
menu
node
path
ping
poll
profile
search
statistics
system
taxonomy
throttle
tracker
upload
user
watchdog
In time, maybe we should "recommend" a setup that's secure and means basic needs?
Here are a few quick suggestions to your module list.
aggregator - not required - are you using it?
color - not required for most themes - are you using it?
legacy - not required and probably not good practice.
locale - not required unless you're translating content.
ping - not required
poll - not required - are you using it?
tracker - not required and known to be db hungry
You were using mostly standard core modules. I've never had problems with such a basic setup. Had you increased the PHP memory limit? If not, you were using the default of 8MB - which is probably not enough.
Most of my sites use the core modules (forum, blog, poll, profile, etc if appropriate for the site). But, if there is any need for structured, user-generated content, I almost always include these:
cck
imagefield
imagecache
pathauto
views
webform
admin menu
tinymce
token
I even have 2 sites that run on shared hosting with Drupal and Gallery2 integration - without much trouble. A memory boost or two should solve the few problems I've had.
If I get some time, I'll write up my standard procedure for Drupal at Modwest and make it available somewhere. Probably not today :)
I first experimented with Drupal 5.3 on my Mac where memory limits are raised. To begin with I used the list I gave and then went on to include the remainder of the modules you list. There was a requirement to aggregate and for multi-lingual support, though you're right some are not strictly required, but I was just testing
I ran in to trouble as soon I tried to set it up what I had running on my Mac on a shared host and that was when it first became apparent that combination of memory and greedy modules were an issue.
One of the reasons I moved to modwest was for the better php support and extra configurability in a shared environment. For various reasons I haven't revisited Drupal since moving to modwest. If you write up a standard procedure I will definitely revisit Drupal.
Anyone see that the White House's recovery.gov website is now powered by Drupal. I bet this will lead to even greater adoption of this CMS, so it's important to support it.
http://techpresident.c...l-matters-0
Assuming Government's got something right for once ;)
It could also be a poisoned chalice for Drupal. Bugtraq :) http://search.security...astmodified