Web Design and Drupal Development Blog

Kay and Vie sell children's puzzles, T-shirts and toys so with Christmas fast approaching they needed their website working. Sadly their Magento site was broken and wouldn't allow access to the admin section or checkout.

Initially we fixed the issue, which turned out to be a common bug with the PayPal secure setting but it turned out the system wasn't what the client had hoped for. So next stop was migration to Drupal and Ubercart with its more user friendly design.

BivvyPower were a start up business looking to transfer their online presence from Ebay to their own website. Having created a 12v portable power supply and keen to start selling, they began with Ebay. But due to the demand decided to work with Makak Media to design and build their online shop.

The 12v power pack was primarily designed to take fishing as it's small and lightweight. Since its launch it's been such a success in a short space of time that orders have come in from as far a field as France and Germany! This prompted BivvyPower to move quickly and start working with us and get their new site live.

Ben and Gary from BivvyPower are both keen fisherman so we decided to keep the site design based around this and their best selling product, the 12v power pack. The BivvyPower shop is powered by Drupal 7 and Ubercart 3, taking advantage of the latest open source software has to offer.

Day 3 started off with a large bucket of tea to try to keep me awake for the rest of the day after a great night out at the o2 Arena for the Drupalcon party. Batman live was great and a show I'll try and take my nephew to.

The free drinks after were also most welcome but this did have an impact on my attention span on day 3!

The keynote today saw The Standardistas discuss marrying web fundamentals with timeless design standards and gave some great tips.

The guys started of with a short list of reading:

• HTML5 for Web Designers
• Grid Systems
• Ordering Disorder

How to make Drupal perform and scale like a rock star gave some important tips on how to get your Drupal site performing.

Some background on speaker Michael Cooper is that he's built 5 CMS before he made the move over to Drupal, which illustrates again how powerful Drupal is out of the box. He's launched sites to handle 5 posts per second and those that failed in 90 seconds!

Why are most Drupal  websites slow?

• Full page renders
• They server dynamic content to anonymous users
• Excessive/non-optimised data base queries
• Naughty modules!

What's the answer?

Well it turns out that caching is the answer, something built into Drupal but often not enabled by a lot of budding Drupalists.

He ran some tests using a cloud server with only 256mb RAM and then monitored the results. There's a number off ways you can monitor your sites performance such as:

• Devel modules
• Hprof

Tom Standage, digital editor at the Economist, gave a great keynote giving an historical perspective on social media.

He started off describing in brief The Economist's move from Coldfusion over to Drupal giving one of the main reasons as the social and community features that are a core part of Drupal.

At the heart of Tom's talk was that new media is pretty much the same as old media.

What did the Romans ever do for us?!

Well it turns out that the Romans invented the tablet before Apple, that's right, back in Roman times tablets were used to note down and share information.

As time went on snippets of information were passed around on scrolls allowing for social sharing. Often these bits of information would be read by those taking the scrolls from one place to the next which is where the first encryption of data started to be introduced to keep messages private, sound familiar?

The day got off to a good start with an excellent keynote speech by Dries on The State of Drupal.

After a short break the rest of the day unfolded with some great sessions and here are my highlights from the day. The bangers and mash wasn't one of them so I might try the veggie option tomorrow!

If you're heading to Croydon College for a session it's a bit of a rat run, up 3 levels, turn right and keep walking then it's a right for BOF or a left Business Day sessions. Make sure you sign in at reception or you'll have security on your back.

Doing Drupal Security Right

A must read according to speaker Gábor Hojtsy is the book Cracking Drupal, I don't think he's on commission but he made a good case for buying it!

A list of security risks relevant to Drupal sites:

• Misconfiguration
• Avoid FTP
• Site might be secure but server could be vulnerable, especially shared hosting
• Avoid php input format
• Most vulnerabilities are in themes

The first keynote speech of DrupalCon 2011 was delivered by Dries Buytaert, the original creator of Drupal, which spelled out a very bright future for Drupal and his goals for the system, more of that later.

He started off with the figure of attendees, a massive 1,750 making this the biggest DrupalCon held in Europe!

Dries went on to emphasise the adoption of Open Source by large media firms and how Drupal is at the forefront of this. But not only media, government offices are also getting involved. Data.gov.uk and London.gov.uk are just two UK sites that use Drupal.

If you think Drupal is only for small scale websites then you might want to check out Symantec which has over 240,000 users making this a huge success story for the company.

Drupal 7 Adoption

Dries highlighted concerns in the community that apparent adoption of Drupal 7 has been slow but this is not the case. Drupal 6 took twelve months to reach 100,000 users, whereas Drupal 7 only took half that time to reach the same number.

The State of Drupal Survey Results