[development] creating forward compatable modules?

[Tao Starbow]

Hi Dan,

Good point.  Right now our infrastructure consists of a single dell 
poweredge (3GHz Xeno, 2GB ram, 70 GB scsi raid), running FreeBSD.  We 
can pretty much dedicate this box to serving Drupal (apache and mysql on 
the same box). We are using the engineering department's network, so I 
am not worried about running out of bandwidth.

We hope to be able to serve as many sites as there is interest.  The 
first stage is to set up sites for about half-a-dozen projects and 
centers and see how they use them.  My feeling is that we could end up 
filling a very important niche on campus, and demand could grow quite 
large, once the word gets out. And CITRIS is not just UCB.  Our charter 
is to encourage inter-departmental & multi-campus collaboration at UCB, 
UC Santa Cruz, UC David & UC Merced.

My guess is that the typical site will have a few dozen, or less, 
registered users producing content that is consumed by a few thousand, 
or less, viewers.  This is my initial target as I pick the supported 
modules and default configurations.  But that is just my guess, and the 
groups might end up using the system very differently.  That is why 
Drupal's combination of features and costomizabilty seems like such a 
great fit.

-tao

Dan Robinson wrote:

>Hi Tao,
>
>Glad to hear things are working for you.  Rather than ask a very open
>ended question about how Drupal scales - for which the only reasonable
>answer is "it depends" - you might try outlining your requirements.  
>How many sites, how many users, how are the sites going to be used,
>administered etc.  Also some information on your current IT
>infrastructure - types of servers, network etc. would be helpful.
>
>Dan
>
>  
>
>>Hi Drupal devs,
>>
>>First, thank you all for an amazingly useful tool.
>>
>>I am a programmer at the CITRIS center at UC Berkeley. We recently
>>finished moving our own web site (http://www.citris-uc.org) over to
>>Drupal and I am now working on the infrastructure to allow us to start
>>providing Drupal-based sites for more of the campus community. So far
>>I have been able to do everything I need with the available modules
>>and a bit of hacking, but I am now starting to create custom modules. 
>>I was wondering if it is possible to create modules that will be
>>compatible with both 4.6 and 4.7?
>>
>>Also, does anyone have advice on how to calculate how many Drupal
>>sites a server can handle?  Installing new hardware can take months
>>around here, so I need to stay well ahead of the curve.
>>
>>thanks,
>>Tao Starbow
>>CITRIS
>>
>>    
>>