Blog /Technology

Drupal is a bit famous for the number of database queries done against a database. When there are thousands of concurrent users to be served, the database can quickly turn into a major bottleneck. This was the case with http://kwestiasmaku.com - a very popular website with recipes. The website is visited by millions of enthusiasts of cooking. When we started our cooperation with KwestiaSmaku, we initially focused on adding new features and functionalities to the website.

In the first article about the tools we use, we described our project management and communication tools. Today we will show you how we manage development environments. Local copy In Droptica each programmer works on a local copy of the website. Each task is completed and committed to a separate Git branch and pushed to a remote repository. Our standard desktop system is Ubuntu therefore for a long time we got away with just installing Apache, Mysql and PHP locally.

Entity API in Drupal 8 is now baked into core and is now so well organised that there is almost no excuse for creating database tables, which are not entities at the same time. If you are serious about Drupal development, check this article below. Entities in Drupal really rock! If you create an entity you get Views integration for free, you can allow the entity to be fieldable and this will out or the box allows you to add various fields to it.

When you use code-driven development on websites based on Drupal sometimes you have to create a menu or a menu item programmatically in hook_update_N. We use this approach to development quite often when, as part of our Drupal support services, we prepare a large batch of changes to be deployed all at ones.

Working in a Drupal agency you do a lot of drupal development and come against various problems. Recently, on a migration to Drupal I encountered a new problem with the Drupal database abstraction layer.

Session at DrupalCamp Wrocław 2013 A sessioon about managing a multi-site installation on Drupal.

At DrupalCamp Wroclaw I was talking about build and test automation in Drupal. Today i uploaded Virtualbox image where you can find configured Jenkins CI and the example of Drupal project with simple PHPUnit tests. We provide a lot of drupal development services and over the years we created a comprehensive workflow for managing drupal websites. In Droptica all our projects are based on this workflow. We use special script for build and tests automation.

Being a drupal agency which provides Drupal support, we deal a lot with performance. In this post, I will discuss a simple setting which substantially increases load time of websites with images. On Debian, Apache installed from repositories has mod_expires turned off by default. This seriously increases server load. So what does mod_expires do?