[development] creating forward compatable modules?

[Tao Starbow]

Thanks for both the information and the encouragement!
I have a cvs head version for my own testing, but I think I am going to 
stick with 4.6 for what we are rolling out to others.
I am happy to contribute as I learn.  I am moving my development notes 
off of our internal wiki and on to a public blog at 
http://www.citris-uc.org/blog/1, if anyone wants to keep up with my 
trials and tribulations.

cheers,
-tao

Dries Buytaert wrote:

> On 23 Nov 2005, at 22:43, Tao Starbow wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>
> Looks like that machine should be able to host quite a few Drupal  
> sites; I'm thinking 250 sites should be possible, but it obviously  
> depends on a number of parameters as mentioned elsewhere in this  
> thread.  Fact is that many small sites scale better than one really  
> big site; because each site is actually fairly small and reasonably  
> static, Drupal's page caching mechanism should be very effective.   
> (I'm somewhat puzzled by Ber's numbers and would like to know more  
> about why he thinks otherwise.)
>
> Creating "forward compatible modules" does not look like a practical  
> option.  It's better to stick with Drupal 4.6 and to upgrade to  
> Drupal 4.7 when the time is right.  Upgrading to Drupal 4.7  
> (including custom modules) should be relatively straightforward but  
> might take a bit of time depending on the amount of custom changes  
> and custom modules.  One thing you can do is start off with  
> PHPTemplate-based themes rather than XTemplate-based themes;  
> PHPTemplate will be the default theme engine in Drupal 4.7.
>
> If you are somewhat adventurous you could start out with Drupal CVS  
> HEAD (the forthcoming Drupal 4.7); it shouldn't be too bad if you  
> stick with core modules.  A good formula for success is to  
> participate in the development of Drupal; you'll quickly learn the  
> ins and outs and will be able to weight decisions much more efficiently.
>
> Tao, some of us (including myself) are very interested in improving  
> Drupal's multi-site features.  It is inevitable that you'll run into  
> some gotchas so I'm hoping you'll participate in the development of  
> said feature.  (Eg. Adrian has been working on a patch to lock or  
> restrict certain settings.)  So welcome on board, and looking forward  
> to your contributions.  ;)
>
> -- 
> Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/
>