If you are [considering] working on an e-Commerce site, and are coming to the Szeged Drupalcon, you may be interested in several sessions around the theme. In order for your session(s) of choice to stand a chance of being actually part of the conference program, you should vote for the sessions you would like to attend.

Subjet to approval by the conference board, I will be animating/presenting a session about the internals of the e-Commerce suite: see http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/sessions/developing-e-commerce for more details. If this is of interest to you, vote on the session to make sure it will indeed be included in the conference program.

I've been keeping track of various technical stats for OSInet's sites for as long as they've been existing (and that means well over 10 years, mind you !), and the June figures show a long expected landmark has been reached : for the first time since the creation of these sites, the operating systems declared as being Unix-ish by user agents (browsers) visiting our sites in June 2008 has broken the 10% barrier (10,08% to be accurate).

If you are coming to Szeged too, we'll probably meet there !

I just found out a very strange PHP feature by browsing the PHP-GTK2 API with the Reflection classes : spaces can be used in some alien places, like variable names.

But the doc says you can't !

Well, try this in PHP 5.2.5, for instance:

In summer 2006, I created the img_relocator module, which was published to my sandbox, and apparently picked up by some Drupal admins, although it was never promoted to full-fledged project status.

I was working on an existing site today, and after installing the e-commerce 3.4 suite (EC), noticed something was very weird: product type modules were enabled, all basic EC modules were there too, and yet, when I created products by hand, the "Anonymous purchase" fieldset appeared, but nothing else from EC.

Worse, when saving the new products, they were properly created in the {node} table, but never appeared in the {ec_product} table, which caused them never to appear as products in the admin products list of the product view available to users. What could be going on ?

With OSInet focusing more heavily now on Drupal services, the company is now offering internships for students interested in working on Drupal.

First things first, I've offered to mentor for the Google Summer of Code, and would be specifically interested if a student picked up the live Drupal backup project if it came to be approved.

The OSInet team recently attended Solutions Linux, a trade fair focused on FLOSS, and while chatting with a sales engineer from a company specialized in Typo3, got asked which CMS we used, and of course answered "Drupal".

At that point, that person flinched somehow, acknowledging that Drupal was indeed one of the "Big 3" in the CMS space, along with Typo3 and Joomla, but was plagued with security issues making it rather unfit for professional deployment, as opposed to Typo3, which took security issues seriously. Continuing the discussion, it appeared that company has indeed at least acquired some Drupal knowhow too, due to customer request, but the person doing the criticizing was not directly familiar with Drupal.

Having recently merged a number of separately configured sites into a single consolidated multisite, I found myself with URLs like:

http://www.site1.com/sites/www.site1.com/files/somefile.png

...on all except the main site of the multisite configuration.

Although img_relocator allows me to just type things like:

<img src="somefile.png" />

... and still have these URLs be automagically generated, they still appear to those users who actually look at the URLs.

Enter mod_rewrite

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

With these sites running over Apache 2.x, mod_rewrite offers a simple way to rewrite the files URLs: in the Apache site definition file for the vhost describing the site, we can use:

At long last, I've moved the OSInet sites from shared hosting to a VDS over the 4-day Xmas period, and overall it went well.

However, with new users (dare I say bots ?) eager to refresh the site after a few hours offline, I soon had to stand about 20 hits/sec, which proved to be a bit too much on this small VDS. So I enlisted the help of APC, just like the drupal.org sysops do, and like I do on the group's intranet servers and it went really faster.