I had the great pleasure of attending my first DrupalCon this week.  Held in downtown San Francisco at the Moscone Center, it was my opinion that this was Drupal's "homecoming".  While Drupal wasn't "born" in San Francisco, it seems to be the city that has the strongest following.  The attendance numbers didn't lie - I'm pretty sure they broke 3,000 geeks attendees.  I made this trip solo -- I only knew three people that were going, and those three were only acquaintances I'd met via email/IM a few months before.  When I left, I didn't come home with "leads" or "contacts", I came home with friends and role models, many of whom I plan on staying in touch with.  I met most of the authors of the Drupal books I've read, associated faces to the podcasts and RSS feeds I subscribe to, and I even had the opportunity to quickly say thanks to Dries and shake his hand.

For those who didn't know, archive.org has made the sessions available for download, so be sure to check those out.  Read on for my "takeaways" from DCSF2010.

It snuck up on me so fast, I forgot to ask - are any of my SysAdmin's Journey readers going to San Franciso for DrupalCon? If so, contact me, and we'll see if we can meet up for a beer! I'm posting this from DIA, so if you happen to be here and want to grab a bite to eat, ping me. I'm flying out to SF at about 12:30pm MDT.

While working on tweaking performance for a client, I was able to shave 7 seconds of PHP execution time time off the homepage load. The cause was eventually tracked down to calls out to TinyURL for every node being rendered. The core problem came from the service links module. We were able to fix it by disabling short URL's in the module, but the problem has been addressed in the current pre-release 2.x branch by using caching. We might have ended up discovering this by disabling module after module one at a time, but that would have taken forever.

Linode rocks. Seriously, read my review. I was talking to a co-worker (whom I converted to Linode as well) about how I would pay double the amount to keep my Linode now that I know how much I use it. Don't tell them that, they're cheap :) If you find this article helpful (or my article about moving VM's to and from Linode), please consider clicking one of the links in this article to sign up for a Linode - if you sign up for 90 days, I'll get $20 credited to my account.

I was setting up a second Linode that was to be a testing ground for some StackScripts I'm working on. The new Linode will eventually replace my existing one. For whatever reason, the most recent version of CentOS they had available was 5.3. Not a big deal, I can 'yum upgrade' up to 5.4 after installation. Well, after doing so, I found that a lot of features that I wanted had been stripped out. In Linode's defense, it's in their best interest to offer very stripped down images for their customers. The one feature I wanted that I couldn't get enabled was SELinux, and simply installing the packages still wouldn't let me use 'setenforce 1' to get it turned on. My best guess as to why is that the Linode kernel didn't support it, but I honestly didn't troubleshoot it too much. I really wanted root LVM capabilities as well, so I decided that a full-on anaconda based installation was the way to go. Plus, I couldn't find anything in the forums about it, so there was the lure of being the first to do it ;-)

Well, thanks to the flexibility offered by Linode, not only can you do a anaconda-based installation (with optional Kickstart), but you can do so using the GUI over VNC if you're so inclined!

The Views Bulk Operations module (a.k.a. VBO), is a godsend for busy Drupal site administrators. Don't just take my word for it - Lullabot wrote a chapter about it in O'Reilly's Using Drupal, it's included in the Open Atrium Drupal distribution, and it's even used on Drupal.org! Out of the box, VBO does a lot to streamline the things you do everyday, so that you spend less time doing them. A perfect example is bulk content moderation - with a few clicks of the mouse, you can mark a huge amount of comments as spam. You can even enable batch processing with a single click of a mouse so that you can literally do thousands of these without timing out.

VBO was attractive enough that we decided to offload the bulk/batch operations of Node Gallery to VBO. Integration for the most part was surprisingly easy - VBO "speaks" in Drupal Actions, so by writing actions, we were writing integration with VBO.

There's one undocumented case where VBO can be used that was critical for us. Most VBO actions you will find perform one action to a set of nodes, one at a time. Often times, that one action is to set a value of some sort on said nodes. In the case of Node Gallery, we wanted to be able to assign different weight values (used for sorting) to a bunch of nodes. The key here is that we aren't assigning a value of '2' to all selected node's weight, we want to assign a weight of 2 to node #1, 3 to node #2, 8 to node #3, and so on. While not straightforward, it's definitely achievable.