We're happy to announce that the latest version of our free Drupal AMI has been released: Drupal AMI 1.0 RC1, AWS ID ami-7e5bbf17. Like the previous version of our AMI, it will allow you to install any version of Drupal that you like, at the click of a button.

What's new in this version? At the request of our users, this AMI comes pre-installed with several packages that are dependencies used by many popular Drupal modules, including pear, screen, php-soap, Crypt_HMAC, and mcrypt (both the package and the apache configuration).  read more »

We’ve had a great response to CDN2, our video platform for Drupal. The number one request so far was to make a Drupal 6 compatible version. I’m happy to announce that CDN2 is now available for Drupal 6 on the Drupal.org project page.

If you haven’t tried to do video online, you’d be surprised at how difficult it is. There’s a large number of formats out there, and often your source video isn’t appropriate for displaying on a web page. The process of converting the source to a format and size that works online and then getting it into Drupal and delivered to your viewers turns out to be expensive and time consuming.  read more »

A few questions arose about how to use the Drupal Amazon EC2 AMI we released in August. We added some screenshots to the page to help show how to configure it and clarified the instructions a bit. To help further, I created a quick screencast demonstrating the process of launching the AMI, connecting it to persistent storage, and then stopping the instance and reconnecting the persistent storage to another instance.  read more »

It has been talked a lot that people are experiencing issues with their user's sessions on their drupal sites in Safari. Most experience the same issue:

• A user logs in, tries to create content and are kicked / logged out and taken to the homepage

It appears the bug has something to do with the way Safari handles URLs (Domain Names). For most localhost environment set ups, its easy to put whatever we would like as our site domain. But there is a problem when it comes to adding (_) verse (-) in those names.

For Example:  read more »

Workhabit customer YourSphere was featured recently in a case study on Drupal.org.

The case study shows how YourSphere is building a secure, safe, and private social network just for teens. They describe how things are built, going into some good detail on the profiles and how the developers made it easy for non-expert admins to add content.

There’s a particularly nice mention of WorkHabit’s scalable Drupal hosting platform, Elastic 2.  read more »

I have been reading with interest the discussions at http://drupal.org/node/337079 and http://groups.drupal.org/node/15965 which both basically deal with the fact that Drupal has versions, and with each version comes a new set of changes both for procedural instructions and code samples, yet the Drupal Documentation can't handle changes in the same way.

So I came up with this idea. Let's continue the process of making a single page in the Handbooks for an idea, such as "Checking Code Out Of CVS", but then use jQuery to toggle hiding for all version-specific info of code snippets or explanations which don't pertain to your current Drupal version.  read more »

Information Week has an article that looks at how success has been achieved by Drupal and Alfresco by integrating social and collaboration features into the products.

The article compares both platforms favorably to large commercial products from the likes of Microsoft and IBM and finds that businesses are frequently evaluating open source platforms along side proprietary packages and choosing based on their requirements, not on a political or ideological basis.  read more »

The second Bay Area Drupal Camp is next weekend at UC Berkeley and WorkHabit is proud to be sponsoring, attending, and presenting.

We’ll be giving sessions on everything from scaling to theming. And I’ll be showing off AutoPilot, our build management product.

If you’re there, we’d love it if you’d say hi. We’ll be the ones in the black WorkHabit shirts.

We've been biten by this on a couple of occasions and I suspect others have struggled with it as well.

When running a process that calls a Drupal function inside of a loop you might encounter memory errors in Drupal. The place that we see it most often is when building import tools. Our code is happily looping over the user data from our import and calling user_save() in Drupal. Or we're grabbing rows from a phpBB database and inserting them as forum posts in Drupal via node_save(). After importing a few thousand rows, the process dies and your web server tells you PHP has run out of memory. So you increase the available memory and your import runs a little longer, but still runs out of memory.  read more »