drupal.com.au

Google loves Drupal

Some time ago I read a comment that "Google loves Drupal". It was conveying the fact that Drupal sites seem to get good prominence in Google.

I am proud of how my sites come up in Google. At time of writing it comes up on google.com.au in top position for a search on the keyword "Drupal". That has been the case consistently since a week or two after the site went live. Now it is also creeping slowly but surely up the international google.com listings.

Dries Buytaert has written an article in which he compares various server configurations in regard to Drupal performance. His benchmarks cover APC (Alternative PHP cache) or no APC, PHP4 or PHP5, reverse proxy, mod_php or FastCGI, Apache or LightTPD. He concludes that:

the slowest configuration is Apache 2 running PHP5 as an Apache module without using APC. Unfortunately, this is one of the most common configurations. The fastest configuration using the more secure FastCGI method, on the other hand, is Lighttpd with PHP4 in FastCGI mode using APC. For anonymous visitors, the latter is almost 4 times faster than the former, while being more secure.

I was pleased today to learn that the e-commerce module set has been released for Drupal 4.7.

Naturally many of us have been waiting patiently for this release. We are extremely grateful for the many Drupallers who have put in their own time to get the new version to the release stage. Evidently there are still a few issues to iron out.

I am anticipating utilising the modules soon in one or two projects on my drawing board.

In the future I would like to be more involved on the work that goes on producing such Drupal Enhancements but to date that has not been practicable for me. I am pleased to be able to begin promoting Drupal in Australia and consider that task to be one of the small ways I give something back to the community.