Latest Blog Posts

Determine PHP memory usage for anonymous users

Submitted by Brian on

In case you've been living under a rock for the past two years: Drupal 7 is known to use quite a bit of PHP memory everytime a page is loaded. I won't get into anything why that is and why it's such a big jump from Drupal 6 (I'm in no position to comment on that), but what you need to know is that Drupal 7 can easily use 40-50 MB per page load for a small to mid size website, and much much more for larger websites. Turn on some sort of PHP opcode cache like APC and you can probably get that small to mid site down to 10MB of usage or lower.

What Adobe is Doing to Stay Relevant on the Web

Submitted by Brian on

I recently attended a PANMA event in Philly focusing on HTML5 & Adobe. Terry Ryan from Adobe gave a stellar presentation on a few things the company is doing to stay relevant in the rapidly changing web. It's no secret that Flash as we know it is dying off. A few months ago, Apple officially said they will not support it on iOS devices, and whatever you may think about that, the general consensus is that Flash will not be a player for much longer.

Creating a primary and secondary horizontal menu in Drupal

Submitted by Brian on

This is a fairly common menu structure for Drupal developers to deal with, and depending on how it functions, it could be super easy. Here's the scenario: you need to display the 1st level of links in a menu horizontally, and the 2nd level in that same menu right beneath it.

There are at least two different ways that this can be implemented. The first is a static approach, where you do NOT need to show children of each primary link when hovering.

Consider this menu strucure:

Why You Should Use A 3rd Party Comment Service

Submitted by Brian on

Drupal is a wonderful content management system. Any Drupal web developer will tell you that there seems to be a module for anything you can think of. For the most part, this is what makes Drupal so great. The community support is second to none and it's never too hard to find a module that suites your needs.

With that said, it's important to understand when there may be something other than Drupal that you should be using for a particular functionality. Commenting is the best example of this.

HTML5 - What a Project Manager Should Know

Submitted by Brian on

HTML5 has become quite the buzz word lately, and it's important for people in both developer roles and project management roles to understand what it really is. The term has been around long enough that clients are aware of it, and may begin to ask "so how will you incorporate HTML5 into our website?" Not knowing how to answer this could be disastrous when attempting to gain the trust of a potential client.

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