Drupal

As promised in an earlier article about blocking server spam, here are some advanced tips on shutting the door to these resource leeches:

#1: Non-existent urls getting hammered:
This is can be a major problem, one which I believe has been at least somewhat cured in Drupal 6, but for Drupal 5 and below a request to a non-existent page such as http://yoururl.com/node/vote/ does not trigger a 404 page as you might expect. Instead the entire front page loads up. Annoying enough as it is, but when combined with a confused/malicious bot that continually hammers the non-existent url, the resource load can be enough to weigh heavily even on dedicated server, let alone a shared-hosting account. [note: there is an update in the comments below with more specific information about the versions of Drupal which are affected by this problem]

During the course of administering a server full of various sites which have been Farked, Dugg, and StumbledUpon'd, I've learned first hand the value of optimizing a Drupal site/server to handle large amounts of traffic. I've also learned that eventually it's likely that the level of optimization for one's Drupal site/server will be rendered mostly irrelevant by frequent, and (mostly) malicious, circumstances.

After spending 3 days trying to get Elipse PDT and the Zend debugger working on Mac OS X, my nerves were very frayed, indeed. Apparently, there has been an ongoing problem with the Zend debugger not stopping at breakpoints on Mac Intel machines...something that has plagued Eclipse through 3 different PHP extensions. (don't even get me started on how crazy it is that Eclipse has seen three completely separate PHP plugins within less than a year)

Perhaps, one of the most important contributed Drupal projects ever released, was released today (at least as far as professional Drupal development goes).

AutoPilot is out and for anyone who has a Drupal site for which they need to worry about syncing development, staging, and or production versions - it's magnificent. I've had privilege of seeing it work in person - and it's unlike anything available to Drupal developers before now.

Though I haven't set up my own local instance of this yet - the version I saw allowed one to be able to simply click a button in order to update changes between a development environment and a staging/production environment.

Congratulations, WorkHabit on such a valuable contribution, and for everyone else - grab this at your earliest convenience and let's work to integrate this as a core part of a Drupal development toolbox, asap. (ala the devel.module)

[Please direct any questions about AutoPilot to WorkHabit and/or the AutoPilot project on Drupal.org.]