Genuine Juice

Back in March, Genuine sent me to Drupalcon 2011 in Chicago. The twice-yearly gathering of the Drupal community focuses on networking, discussions and sessions on everything Drupal. As one of the lead Drupal developers at Genuine, I was eager to go. For three days I breathed, slept and ate Drupal (quite literally, the food spread was amazing).

One of the first sessions I attended was given by Bryan House, Vice President of Marketing for Aqucia. Brian’s session focused on how to position Drupal over proprietary alternatives when pitching to clients (so listen up project & account managers!). Drupal now powers 1.5% of the internet; this may sound like a small percent, but that is over 1 million websites. Drupal is gaining traction as one of the most popular open source platforms for website development.

So what does this mean to clients. It means reduced development cost and faster turnaround time for high performance websites. With over 7,000 published modules Drupal developers have to spend less time re-inventing the wheel, and with a community of over 500,000 active members developers are never far from a solution to a problem. Since Drupal has a modular and flexible architecture, a module built for one project can be easily be used on multiple other projects with little to no additional development. You can hear Bryan Houses full session here.

Since at Genuine we are developing more and more mobile applications, two of my most anticipated sessions were “Mobile App Development Using Drupal as a Base” by Sumit Kataria and “Drupal on the Go with jQuery Mobile” by TomTim Cosgrove and Brian McMurray. During Sumit’s session he explained and demonstrated how you can use Appcelarator’s Titanium studio along with the Drupal services module to build native iPhone and Android applications powered by Drupal. This means that you can easily develop an accompanying mobile application for any Drupal website. Sumit’s session can be viewed here.

Tom Tim and Brian’s session focused more on the power of Drupal’s theming engine, which allows for multiple “themes” to be used on a single site. They spoke about how using some HTML5 and jQuery mobile you can build a theme for your website that would look great on mobile browsers. With the information and ideas provided in these two sessions, you can build a website, Andriod app, iPhone app and mobile site with a single Drupal installation. Talk about a flexible architecture! Tom Tim and Brian’s session can be viewed here.

One of Drupal’s downfalls is performance; it can be very resource heavy. Genuine has experienced this first-hand with a few client Drupal sites, but our development team has come up with a number of working solutions. This is one of the reasons why I was intent on attending Kenny Silanskas’s session “Drupal Performance Tuning.” Kenny spoke about some great methods for improving page load time, and reducing server strain for Drupal websites. Drupal allows for using a number of different caching methods; the default is database caching, but the performance is poor and still requires server calls. If you add in opcode caching (such as apc and memcache), static file caching (using the Drupal boost module) and reverse proxies (such as varnish) you can greatly improve the performance of your Drupal site. Kenny’s session can be viewed here.

I returned from Drupalcon with a wealth of knowledge to share not only with the development team, but just about every department at Genuine. As we see an increased demand from our clients to build Drupal based projects, this knowledge will help us continue to build high performance, unique, award-winning sites.