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On one of the maintenance projects we got we came across a page that used to take around 11 seconds to load. The page was a views listing for users. We were able to speed up the page load times from around 11 seconds to under 3 seconds by taking out just the distinct option used in the view. The following was the select query that was originally generated from the view with the time logged by views in the preview panel.

In every operating system, there are a lot of tasks that need to be scheduled to run at a particular time - some, very often (as in, every 5 minutes), and some, less (like, once every month). For a quick example, you might want to run a temporary files deletion operation at midnight each day - this is where you need to write a cron job.Crontab and Cron jobs are Linux’s version of a complete job scheduling system.Let us see these in detail.

Boost is a module that allows for static caching on a Drupal site for improving performance for anonymous users. You can read more about how to install and configure boost here. Boost comes with a boost crawler that can crawl your site and refresh the boost cache. Here is a simple script that can be used to refresh the boost cache without enabling the boost crawler.

Developing a Drupal website is a complicated and long process. You have to check whether all the design and functionalities meet with the client specifications. And before the site going to be live you have to check certain criteria.These checklists describes the criteria that should be tested before a site going to be live.

Directi is one of the largest domain registrars on the internet with their services such as ResellerClub, and they provide wonderfully complete to-go solutions for resellers. But there are times when you would want to build upon their platforms rather than just use their entire solution. For this, they provide you the Directi API. You can build upon these as you wish to build out customized solutions of your own. One of the first steps in registering a domain is checking the availability of the domain name you are interested in. DirectI API provides the checkAvailability function for this.

WHM(Web Hosting Manager) WHM is a web hosting application that provides access to various server tools and functions to help the server administrators and resellers. Using WHM, the administrator can

It is required of every Drupal developer to keep ahead of common browser compatibility issues. IE is probably the most notorious browser in any drupal developer’s dictionary. IE is a very peculiar browser in terms of standards compliance. Font issues are very common on IE than elsewhere. Here is a small piece of CSS, that seems to work fine everywhere else other than IE:

The Freedom Toaster from Zyxware Technologies is back. This time at the Santhigiri Fest, 2012. Santhigiri Ashram took the initiative to provide us with a space for Freedom Toaster at the venue of the Santhigiri Fest, 2012. For those of you who may not know, the Freedom Toaster is a kiosk from where you can burn Free Software Distributions and Softwares freely. This time, we have added the latest version of Ubuntu, (Precise Pangolin, Ubuntu 12.04), IT@School and Malayalam Offline Wiki. There are many more Distributions including Fedora, Mint, CentOS.

On a Drupal site that came up for some minor alterations recently we came across an issue where some menu links disappeared for anonymous users while they appeared normally for the administrative users. On digging further we came across an issue with an implementation of hook_db_rewrite_sql in a contributed module. But along the way we had to debug the full process of generation of primary links and how node level access permissions are checked during this process.

One of the servers we maintain suddenly started developing performance hiccups. The site running on the server was a fully static website configured with static page caching via boost. The site used to receive a reasonably good volume of anonymous and search engine traffic on a daily basis. The only form on the site was a search form which existed as a separate page.

It's another Friday Morning at the office, and Sandeep's fingers are running across his keyboard at twice the speed of light (or well, at a few fractions of the speed of light).

A Drupal website can be improved with lessened rate of defects and increased usability, when quality assurance is well implemented. Once you validate your Drupal site against the following checkpoints, you can assure a quick remedy for any glitches or compatibility issues that might occur: Quality Assurance

The success of a website depends on many aspects, its maintenance being the most crucial. Only a well maintained website will have a vibrant impact on the visitors. The below checklist helps you ensure that your Drupal website is well oiled time to time. Backups and Maintenance