Drupal

If you build quality sites that attract a large number of visitors and interaction there eventually will come a point when you have to start looking for ways to offload your files and bring down your server overhead. I have been looking into the CDN issue off and on for the past 6 months. Recently I decided it was time to get something dialed in and move forward. I wanted something that required the least number of hacks and was easy and scalable. This post isn't meant to be an end all to Drupal and CDNs, but rather just some insight into the way I have tackled this issue for the time being.

Anybody who uses Drupal and is looking to sell products will ultimately come to this question. I'm gonna cut straight to the chase and say the better cart is Ubercart. I have used both and only have great things to say about Ubercart. I don't think it comes down to the type or size of the site you are building either. I'd use Ubercart for any site, large or small, auctions or no auctions, extreme customization or just plain and simple.

Let's start with what you SHOULDN'T use:

Drupal Ecommerce

A few days ago I copied a Drupal site up on a GoDaddy server for somebody and noticed something immediately. My freaking sites were running REALLY slow on my server. This shared $10/mo GoDaddy server was outperforming my beefed up dedicated box hosted at a really good company by like 10x. How could this be? I wasn't quite sure, but it made me realize that Drupal sites really could run fast and I needed to find out what I was doing wrong.

I should consider becoming a salesman for Drupal because I am always talking about how good it is. But it really is. If you are not using Drupal you have 2 options:

1. Get Drupal
2. Suicide

Although suicide may sound appealing you're probably better off just downloading Drupal. Once you download Drupal here are some key things that make it so powerful:

1. User Accounts

Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress are the 3 most popular content management systems according to Alexa and most webmasters. They all have their own blend of features and options that allow for extremely powerful and well-built web sites. With such feature rich systems it is important to understand the different aspects of each one to help with making a better choice as to which CMS fits you.

It should be noted that this chart is written from a web developers perspective and I am fairly experienced with creating sites with a CMS or without. I have used all 3 systems for developing web sites, but strictly stick to Drupal now as it allows me to built the most powerful sites the easiest.

Besides the more obvious reasons of having more sites to work with and more assets to leverage managing multiple Drupal sites can be beneficial for a number of reasons.

It forces you to make things open, scalable and dynamic for all sites.

Building a Drupal Web Site can be a very scary task to both beginner and experienced web designers. I have been building and theming Drupal web sites for about 2 years now and during this time I have developed my skills and picked up a few things that I would like to share.

It should also be noted, that as with any website, good design is not just entirely graphics and typography and stuff. A lot off good design is a well-planned out site with useful features, lots of content in the right places and things of this nature.

You still have to be a decent designer

When you first get started with Drupal it can be extremely intimidating as there are many options, modules and things goin on. This guide will help show you some of the most important parts of Drupal that really make it stand above other content management systems.

How to control different parts of the page

Different parts of a page are controlled via different template files. The primary ones you will deal with are:

I have been using Drupal for over a year now and everyday I just love it more and more. I am mainly a designer that also has programming experience so Drupal is a great match for me as it allows me to use my design skills to tweak the front-end and then use a bit of programming to make everything hook into the back-end smoothly.