Drupal

I was at the Affinity Labs yesterday and Alex Barth gave an introductory talk about the Schema API in Drupal 6.0. I could glean the following pragmatics from his informative presentation:

I have not been able to get my hands on the original document, there is an distillation review of the report on CNet.

Interestingly the report cites Drupal and Alfresco and two leading contenders for the OSS CMS (or rather Web-CMS) space.

Distressing comment about the Drupal module that works with CDNs:  "This module is not yet production ready. It works fine on smaller sites, but it doesn't scale yet"I'm thinking of using ProxyHTMLURLMap for this purpose.

I've had a hard time finding articles and diagrams that illustrate the Drupal architecture. I've decided to post items explicitly in that area.Stay tuned.

The organization of the Drupal’s architecture at the subsystem level is traditional. It requires the use of a web server to handle transport via the http protocol and a relational database for persistence. Drupal exhibits the traditional three tiered architecture as seen in the attached image:

The current Solr-Drupal integration module written by Robert Douglass is very sophisticated. There are a three things that would be helpful:

1. The ability to with in with a Solr Cluster -- split read writes -- you send updates to a solr update instance and read from a read instance.
2. Allow a cck field mapping wizard in the admin pages
3. Generate a schema.xml for updating the Solr scheme when the mapping of cckfields is updated.

I seems that there is an effort to integrate the Solr module in Drupal to the Views family of modules, details here.Offered to collaborate with Thomas -- the chap running the effort.

On Lucene in action is a great book for anyone who has to solve practical problems with Lucene or its related family of products. For me, someone who is working on a fairly complex Solr install the book is a gem because:

Interesting,There are two CAPTCHA alternatives to the original Drupal CAPTCHA module.

1. ReCaptcha -- interestingly enough it uses the http://recaptcha.net/ webservice whichas a useful byproduct helps digitize books.
2. Mollom which uses the Mallom web service -- Non other than Dries Baytart is involved