Now that Drupalcon Chicago is over, I found some time to fix the slides from my session at the Drupal Dev Days in Brussels. It took some time because neither Google Presentations nor Slideshare apparently like the MgOpen font family.

The presentation is now on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/fgm-osinet/drupal-views-development.

The progressive code samples are attached to this blog entry, as a tarred Git repository.

Every so often, I get asked about whether it is really worth it to chase double quotes and constructs like print "foo $bar baz", and replace them with something like echo 'foo', $bar, 'baz', or even to remove all those big heredoc strings so convenient for large texts.

Of course, most of the time, spending hours to fine comb code in search of this will result in less of a speedup than rethinking just one SQL query, but the answer is still that, yes, in the infinitesimal scale, there is something to be gained. Even with string reformatting ? Yes, even that. But only if you are not using an optimizer.

Just don't take my word for it, Sara Golemon explained it years ago with her "How long is a piece of string" post, in 2006.

I noticed today that one of my sites returned 403 Access denied on various pages with URLs like format/<foo>, although it was an alias for a taxonomy/term/<tid> taxonomy path which was actually available when not aliased. What could be going on ?

Received this Harris Interactive poll today, on behalf of Tarsus, the french company organizing the Solutions Linux expo.

One of the choices was a list of the top 30 Internet Technologies. And guess what ? For once, Drupal was on the list: first time I see it mentioned in this type of business context. Interesting.

Most of the time, when working on some piece of code, I'll resort to the configured debugger in my current Zend Studio configuration. And you probably do too :-)

However, I often have to access debug-type information on live sites where installing a debugger is out of the question, and I find myself often resorting to parameter dumps like the following:

You've probably being using it too and, of course, after the first few dozen times, it becomes a bit used. So here's a tiny snippet that makes such dumps simpler to type and use :

Sometimes, you want to delete a whole bunch of users, terms, or nodes, say to cleanup a site while developing and still keep its configuration, so reinstalling is not really an option, and the normal content- or user-administration pages get in your way because they only show a limited number of entries, meaning you have to delete page after page of entries.

Just in case you've been living under a rock (but then how did you find this post ?), we will be doing a code sprint next week to bring RDF fields in core for Drupal 7.

Thanks Scor for organizing this.

The problem : Drupal awfully slow on Vista (and Seven) with Wampserver

For some time now, I'd been severiously annoyed by the (utter lack of) performance of Drupal 6 and 7 on my home PC, which happens to be running Microsoft Vista: considering I was used to getting page times around 200ms on a fractional Celeron with Apache 2.2 on a Linux server hosted comparatively far across the net from that same machine, I felt the 5 to 15 seconds response time per page on this local machine with a quad core and 3 GB RAM were really making me lose my time.

The solution

After some time spend googling around, I stumbled upon an incredibly simple tip, which made the 5 to 15 seconds per page drop down to around 1 second when logged in, and well below 500 ms when not logged in. It's incredible what ONE single character in a plain text file gets you under Vista :-)

UPDATE 2010-01-23: David Hogg tells us (see below) that this works for Windows Seven too

Using a graphics library, be GD, ImageMagick or anything else, is convenient, but carries a price to pay: unlike most Drupal parts, which are generally database-bound, image generation is typically CPU-bound: generating many images on the fly can significantly increase the CPU load on a system, while Drupal setups are typically not optimized for this, and could result in problems if you are using Drupal on a shared hosting account. So what ?

In the previous post, we saw how to create a XHTML progress bar widget for Forms API, using theme_progress_bar. The next logical step is now to create a graphical equivalent to that progress bar, as an example for far more advanced fully graphical widgets made possible using a similar mechanism.