[drupal-devel] TCPHP goes for Drupal

[Chris Johnson]

Last Saturday, May 21, Allie Micka[0] and I gave a presentation to the
Twin Cities PHP users group (TCPHP [1]) about Drupal.  We had about 20
people attend.  There is now a dramatic increase in the interest in
using Drupal, and we have a number of professionals recommending and
implementing sites using Drupal.  One consultant has a client that is
going to implement 100 web sites using Drupal.  These PHP developers
and consultants who are new to Drupal are coming up with some concerns
and questions that seem worth giving some visibility to among the
Drupal developers -- you all.

I've attempted to summarize some of those concerns below.

1.  Memory usage.   Drupal quickly exceeds the default 8MB memory limit
for PHP when a few modules are installed.  This is a problem with
several solutions, and some work is already done. [2]

2.  Clearing out settings and other data from modules that were once
enabled and installed, but are no longer in use.  Many of us know how
to use SQL to directly manipulate the table data to fix this, but it
might be nice to have this in the admin code. [3]

3.  Improved support for load-balanced server farms and other large
site load distribution technologies.  There is already a patch to
support replicated databases.  [4][5]

4.  Advocacy:  As we were generating our slides and talks, we found
existing information somewhat disparate.  It would be great to have a
forum or taxonomy where anybody could post existing presentations,
training information and other "unofficial" advocacy resources.

[0] http://www.tcphp.org/user/3
[1] TCPHP:  http://www.tcphp.org/
[2] Memory usage thread:  http://tinyurl.com/9yt89
[3] Clearing module settings:  http://tinyurl.com/9rpyq
[4] Drupal server farm:  http://tinyurl.com/89nxg
[5] Replication support:
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/sandbox/crackerjm/
replication/


--
Chris Johnson