I had to check again to confirm the multisite thing - looks easy and doable.

I might try it, just to mess with drupal more than I have.

If you decide on cool modules, it would be interesting to hear about it.

It might have been on the Drupal site but in my research I did run across a testimonial from a mainstream site that had "outgrown" their wordpress install and ported everything over to drupal and are extremely happy and continued on their growth.

There are some very key modules & workflows that help a lot with putting sites together. Primarily I've found Views to be indispensable, but it's not overly simple, IMO. To introduce it, basically you can take anything in the database and display it roughly any way you want, creating "views" of your data fields in about any configuration you want. Combined with very flexible theming, you can create sweet-looking pages (or posts or "nodes", etc.) that are quite custom.

I'm currently working on pulling in feeds and stripping out elements to display in a custom format... might not be able to go to far with this concept in the immediate future, since I have a mainstream client starting to bug me about doing a Flash game for him. I swear it's taken me forever to get my adult domains working for me again!

I wonder what I should make of a recent resonably long thread over at the zoo that seems to be a paen to wordpress, expecially the latest version, and repeatedly bashes drupal?

No mention of wordpress limitations in the thread, at least so far. Since I'm hunting for more analysis of this auggested wordpress problem, I find that lack of worries about wordpress interesting.

Somone mentions an adult site built with joomla, sounds like it might be a surfer board kinda thing - which means what, a shitload of stolen content and bandwidth?

I've never personally installed joomla - I probably should, just to see how it works - the frequent claim being that the joomla bbs package is way better than drupal - and since the drupal bbs systems I've seen didn't thrill me, WAY worse than vbulletin, I can believe that joomlas bbs is better.

Briefly, on each page that is composed, wordpress runs the following query:

The query is dynamically generated, and, is almost unindexable in its general state, but, that's not where the issue comes to play. You can see that it is picking the 25 most recent posts, but, SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS requires it to continue to do a tablescan to get the total number of rows so wordpress can figure out pagination.

Hit the front page of a wordpress site, and generally that query will be cached. If you hit that on all of your archive pages, each time the page is generated, it must hit that query. The query holds an exclusive lock on the tables, so, when googlebot hits the first page holds the lock, the second requests must wait until the previous request finishes then holds its lock, the third page requires both of the previous to complete, and the saga continues.

When you have 100 posts on your blog, its not really that much of an issue, but, with 2000 posts on your blog, it creates a bit of a backlog. With the introduction of 2.6, wordpress got the brilliant idea to hold revisions in the main table (their beta held revisions in a separate table). Now, when you get a feed post in from a sponsor, and you edit it to fix a quote mark or something else, then see a third mistake so you edit that, now, your 2000 post blog quickly gets 6000 records that it must sort through.

Put 80 blogs on a server when googlebot starts hitting and you've got a mess.

Joomla/Mambo is not without its faults. Even version 1.5 does its own processing of images to check permissions and will crumble under load -- especially with the SEO plugin.

Any of them can handle a high traffic site with enough load balancers, caching servers, mysql pools, etc.

Now, the one thing that kills wordpress/joomla/mambo/drupal is the fact that they insert themselves into the '404' process. By handling 404's themselves, all of the processing required to run the page is executed everytime firefox asks for favicon.ico and it isn't there -- or any file that 404's. A missing stylesheet, thumbnail image, icon, etc can cause havoc in the site in addition to its normal load.

All boils down to people that write software for simplicity rather than performance. The age old example is the picture of the day script.

How many times a day do you need to decide which picture to display? I don't know how many scripts I've seen that count the number of images in a directory and do a modulo based on the julian date to figure out which one to display on each pageload. Or, the script takes the day of the month and the images are listed as 01.jpg, 02.jpg, etc.

Engineering to run a blog network like that is not without its challenges.

~heaving sigh~

And here I thought WP was the way to go for my upcoming blog. Now I've to look at Drupal, TextPattern, Moveable Type, & B2Evolution.

2 steps forward, 1 step back. Guess I'd better get used to it now that I'm heading down a completely new path.

Currently I'm taking a close look at B2evo and I do like what I see.

But being totally honest, WP is still a good script. I simply pushed it further than what was envisioned by those who created it. I would guess that about 90% of the bloggers would never have an issue.

Use it for what it was intended, a blogging script that takes care of posts in a reverse order. If you want to add a bunch of pages, like galleries, do it in static HTML and don't use the page function in WP. Keep your plug-ins to a minimum and I doubt you'd ever have a problem.

Gee, now you tell us, hahahahha.

Sounds like you might have been abusing the hell out of that poor puppy.

So whats to like about b2evo?

Shit, I just figured no one really listened to what I had to say anyway. ;)

So far what I I'm liking is that a lot of the features I wanted with WP I had to use a plug-in for. B2Evo seems to have that functionality built into it. I'll assume that means a lot less conflicts with various plug-ins and that when updates occur you don't nearly the concern about whether your plug-ins will work with the new release and if the original author will bother updating it at all.

B2Evo is a multi-blog platform so I believe it should be pretty easy to cross promote your blogs provided they are on the same domain.

It was simple to move posts from WP into B2Evo. While I probably wont do much of that, it's nice to know I can.

I still need a bit more time with the script to really say for sure if it's where I'm going to settle for future projects but so far I'm liking what I see.

I'm a few steps behind you, Walrus, but I'm quickly getting tired of some of the issues you've been discussing with WP.

well fuck, I broke a Wordpress blog I've been working on by adding to many categories
BO badly needs an update (tags and categories)
So tell me Walrus how goes b2evo?
Can feeds be added with BA?
Does it have decent Tagging?

It does have XMLRPC capability so I would assume BA would work.

Don't know what happened but when I was doing all the shit I was doing moving from box to box to box my copy of BA must have gotten misplaced as it is no longer installed. BASTARDS!

It does do a good job with tags.

Before there was WP or even B2Evo there was Evolution. It split into those two scripts many years ago. The nice thing is that it's admin interface is similar enough to WP that it's pretty comfortable navigating a new script.

I hope that doesn't mean that if has many of the same problems WP has.

Pat if you want to take a look around the admin area let me know and I'll set you up a user / pass and you can play till your hearts content.

|thumb please do
You know you can download BA again at the owners lounge, you will have to reinstall it on the same domain.
Kaktus told me he would have the new BO update done by the end of the month, I'm not holding my breath|angry|

Ya, I know but that means I need to input all those fucking feeds again! But I do have a few splogs that need them so I guess I best get it done :(
Seems like I've heard that before.

Check your PM's for some exciting news from The Walrus....ok nevermind just check your pm

Thanx Walrus
Now you have a PM

BA and B2evo are no bueno they use an API that Kaktus has never seen before |huh
|whisper| Kaktus says he will have a beta version of BO out by the end of next week for me to test

Be interesting to hear how the tests go

My solution to WP problems is not have a successful blog -- if the site isn't getting any traffic then all these problems go away!

I'll give you this solution for free, no charge. Extensively tested and proved on my sites!

:)

i've used both WordPress and Blogger. I like the Blogger platform but the templating scheme is a little more advanced. I used to have Blogger FTP the blog posts to my server, so everything is static.

Might be something you want to look into if you're concerned about performance and you don't need a specific WP plugin.

The bashing probably comes from a frustration over a lack of documentation. The drupal.org documentation desperately needs a glossary. All the documentation language is written at the intermediate to advanced level thereby leaving noobs facing a steep learning curve. If one is patient and focuses on one issue at a time and is adept at google searching for confusing terminology Drupal is a fantastic choice.

Most people just don't want to go through the initiation cause their in such a big damn hurry. Drupal is more like the tortoise than the hare. So if you choose to go down the path of the Drupal you can be certain it is one that will serve you well for a very long time. You should be aware though that it is not going to be "easy". You're going to have to face a period of familiarization before you start to sing its praises.

I've built 2 mainstream sites and am currently working on my 1st adult content site using Drupal. The first one was HELL. I won't lie to you about that. The second one though was much better. And this third one is coming together like gangbusters. Individual results may vary. I've worked on these sites many a night into the dawnlight hours. All totalled I've spent probably 300 hours working with Drupal.

My advice if you decide to go with Drupal is:

1. use the most stable build(6.9 i think)
2. get core setup complete before loading any modules
3. find some themes, pick one, configure it to your liking,
4. load only one module at a time, configure the module before loading another module
5. rinse repeat.

It helps also to have goals/objectives to shoot for when choosing modules. That way you're building your site with a specific functionality in mind from the start. Doing this keeps you from wasting time installing and configuring modules you don't need or don't use.

I'm open to Drupal questions and will help wherever I am able.

Walrus, a month later how are you liking b2evo?

Thinking about trying it on the new blogs I build this week.

I temporarily shelved that project and moved away from building more blogs for a short while.