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High Performance

Huge sites require a stable, reliable, and scalable solutions. Sage Tree Solutions will help you determine the necessary high performance hardware to run your Drupal applications with confidence.

Portfolio Project: Phoenix College

Phoenix College heads the Miracopa Community College network, one of the largest districts in the nation and the largest provider of higher education in Arizona. Phoenix College needed a scalable, well-designed website that was as cutting edge as their curriculum and could serve as the go-to resource for students, faculty, and community members.

Sage Advice: Ready to Take Your Drupal Site Mobile? Part Two: Mobile-Only Solutions

This second installment of, "Ready to Make Your Drupal Site Mobile?" investigates the options available to Drupal site owners concerned about making their sites accessible to a mobile audience. In the last post, we explored the reasons and methods for going responsive. This time we'll look at the pros and cons of building a separate mobile experience or application for a Drupal website.

Mobile Version

If sacrificing a beautiful, full-featured desktop layout for the pleasure of hand-held and tablet users is not an option, consider a separate mobile site. Organizations with especially complex sites from the San Diego Union-Tribune to ESPN to USA.gov offer mobile users a simplified version of their websites.

Mobile Theme

Some site owners opt to have a mobile-only theme rather than a completely different build. In this scenario, the browser detects the device and serves up an optimized theme accordingly.On the surface this seems like a simple solution, however mobile menus, blocks, contexts and views must be specifically designed for the mobile experience and need to live side-by-side with the existing pieces of the site.

Mobile App

The third approach - sometimes done in conjunction with the previous two - is to build a mobile app. Instead of going to a browser like Safari or Bing, the user will download the app and access the data that way. Of course, apps may never reach 100% of mobile users. One reason being that the user has to take the extra step of going to the Android or Apple Store installing and in some cases paying for what they can get free on their desktops. The advantage of a mobile app is having complete control of the user's experience.

Conclusions

There are no short cuts to having a great mobile site. Experienced developers can ease a client's pain by providing a clear options based on the company's specific needs and current website architecture. Responsive web design is certainly the ideal choice, but not always an option. At Sage Tree we work with clients upfront to discover the most viable option for taking their site mobile. A well prepared client will have metrics for their curent site or in-depth research on their target market.

Sage Advice: Ready to Take Your Drupal Site Mobile? Part One: The Responsive Approach

The world of the mobile web has arrived. Among US adults, 25% own tablet computers and the vast majority have smartphones. Some predict mobile web traffic will surpass desktop traffic in the nex few years. This two-part blog post looks at the options for Drupal site owners concerned about making their sites accessible to the next generation of users.

Responsive: One Site Fits All

Responsive websites look good on any device regardless of screen- and browser-width. By using a design that is flexible and touch-screen friendly you ensure that users have a great web experience no matter how they access your site. Sites that are going to be rebuilt or redesigned today should absolutely consider responsive web design. To see responsive web design in action, go to Comic-Con.org and resize your browser window!

The Good and the Bad

Add Pages Not Regions

For most of web design history we've been able to expand the number of footers, blocks, sidebars, links, slideshows, images and menus with relatively few drawbacks. In the mobile world, those extra pieces of information can make a site painfully slow. When designing, ask your team: do our visitors really need this feature, does it need to be on every page and can it live on its own page? If the feature can live on its own page rather than in a sidebar, your visitors will have a lot less roundabout scrolling to do.

Consolidate Menus

On a hand-held device, you simply don't have the real estate to employ several menu structures. Figure out what pages and features are most often accessed by your audience and from there decide where you can consolidate and simplify the menu structure. Knowing your audience is essential to any site design, but especially important for mobile versions. A tool like Google Analytics is a good resource of information if you have a pre-existing site.

Forget the Slideshow?

Everybody loves slideshows, right? They may be pretty, but they can significantly weigh down a site. A slideshow that also works on a wide desktop screen can turn a 50K page to a full MB (that's 20x the size). This means page load time will be significantly slowed down which can be frustrating to the people visiting your site. Frustrated visitors will usually click away from your site, which in turn hurts your search engine rankings.

Sidebar Right not Left

Sure, you can can move around elements in a mobile page with a little javascript, but things can fall into the mobile space easily by simply using the "mobile-first" thought process for site architecture. From an ease-of-programming standpoint, go with a right sidebar instead of a left sidebar. The right sidebar will naturally fall under the main body text on smaller screens.

Which Base Theme Should You Use?

At Sage Tree, we like using the Omega base theme for most of our Drupal 7 responsive sites. It's flexible, extendable and has a high Drupal community addoption rate, meaning themers from a variety of backgrounds are all speaking the same language. As with most newer Drupal themes, Omega is designed to be responsive and mobile-friendly "out of the box". Right now we'd say Omega is the best choice for the vast majority of responsive use cases out there.

The Bottom Line

If you're ready for a site redesign and new architecture, responsive is definitely the way to go. You'll make those viewing your site on their smart phones and tablets extremely happy not to have to pinch, zoom and scroll like crazy. Desktop and mobile users alike can have access to all of your sites features and content by taking  the "mobile-first" design approach. With proper forethought and consideration, you can have a Drupal site that is easy to maintain and serves a rapidly growing marketplace of smart phone and tablet users.

Sage Advice: Disaster Recovery - What Will You Do When Your Drupal Site Really Breaks?

Disasters Happen - It's Just a Question of When

Spurred by a completely broken server at one of our clients we are re-evaluating our own backups and disaster recovery plans. As we all know, most people give little thought to backups, and even less to how to use them for recovery. In the meantime our servers quietly hum along and then act up at the most inopportune time. It is not a question whether a server will fail or not, it will - it is just a question of when it will fail and what you will do to recover from the failure.

Know the Risks

Your first line of defense is knowing your site, identifying single points of failure, and placing a probability on the failure. Then you figure out how much mitigation you need to reduce your exposure to risk.

Mitigate the Risk

Code and databases are most prone to break or otherwise get corrupted. Fortunately we have easy solutions in code repositories and backups. The harder problem is how you will make use of those tools to recover from a failure, but we will address this later. For now make sure you create backups on a regular basis and that at least some of these backups do not live on the same server. Also make sure that you have backups for everything, the server OS and its configuration, your site code and the database(s).

The Importance of Offsite Backups

Or maybe we should rather call this "the importance of off-server backups". Regardless, you need to absolutely make sure most of the backups are not stored on the server itself. If the server crashes completely and takes its storage with it - believe me, it happens! I have seen it many times, most recently last week - you need those off server backups. So be absolutely sure there are backups elsewhere and recent enough for your comfort level. You will need them some day.

Develop a Recovery Procedure

Having backups and spare parts in hand is well and good, but you want to be able to do something with them. Moreover, when you need them you will be very stressed or worse, not be there yourself. You need a recovery procedure, fully documented and ready to go. Take your time with this, you will be glad you did. Make sure all steps are covered, that someone only vaguely familiar with the setup can understand it, and most importantly, that it contains information on how to access passwords and other security features in a secure manner.

Test the Integrity of Your Backups

Finally, you want to be sure you can actually get a server back with the help of your recovery procedure and necessary parts and backups. At the very least review the recovery procedure once or twice a year and check for accuracy given the current server configuration, and look through your backups to ensure they are readable and able to be unpacked. Better still is to perform the basic recovery steps and thus test whether it all works as planned.

Sage Advice: Replace MySQL with MariaDB on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Why MariaDB?

MariaDB includes important security fixes, a high performance drop-in replacement for the InnoDB storage engine, named XtraDB, and is a completely compatible replacement for MySQL without the doubts surrounding Oracle's stewardship of the MySQL project. In addition, MariaDB is headed up by the original MySQL project founder and lead, Michael "Monty" Widenius. In short, there is no good reason not to use this exciting fork of the venerable MySQL database project.

MariaDB site
Add the MariaDB repository

We need to add a new repository to our list of recognized package locations and ensure the digital signature is recognized.

Upgrade the packages

This one is very straightforward:
aptitude upgrade mysql-common libmysqlclient18

Aptitude will respond with a bunch of messages and ask you for confirmation before it attempts to overwrite what you have in place. If all goes well you will now have MariaDB installed.

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