Pressflow 7: Continuing to Push Performance and Scalability in Drupal
Interview with David Strauss about Pressflow 7
Pressflow - a Drupal distribution that provides improved performance and scalability and which is particularly useful for high traffic sites - continues to develop and the guys behind it over at Four Kitchens have some exciting plans for Pressflow 7 and beyond. After Jeff's post outlining how important speed is for the data heavy sites we build and why we use Pressflow and Varnish to make them faster, I wanted to dig in to find out what's next for Pressflow. I talked with David Strauss, the creator of Pressflow, to get the low down on their plans for the project in the New Year.
Q: I thought all the changes from Pressflow were ported into Drupal 7?
A: Pressflow 7 and later will continue to provide significant improvements over Drupal's performance and scalability. Even maintaining existing Pressflow 6 features will keep Pressflow ahead of Drupal 7 in performance and scalability. But yes, most of the main Pressflow 6 features are in Drupal 7 or have equivalents. We're glad that's the case; it opens the door for new development on Pressflow while maintaining good compatibility with Drupal. Drupal 6 included changes that were in Pressflow 5.
Right now there is work underway to get as many Pressflow 6 changes into Drupal 7 as possible. We've been having discussions with Angie, Dries, and a bunch of core developers over what's viable to merge.
Q: What exactly will Pressflow 7 give me that Drupal 7 will not?
A: Pressflow supports multi-tier proxy layers, which is in use by several major sites. No version of Drupal (including the one in development) can properly handle this architecture. But Dries wants this support in Drupal, so I wouldn't be surprised if it makes the final Drupal 7 release.
Drupal 7 also lacks solutions for common, slow queries that are optimized in Pressflow in a MySQL-specific way. Last-minute Drupal 7 work is underway there too, but that work has continued for a long time (generally since Drupal 6 development). So, it's not clear if those optimizations will make it into the upcoming Drupal release.
Porting existing Pressflow 6 features to Pressflow 7 is far from the final word. Like Pressflow 6, 7 will integrate valuable improvements from Drupal's ongoing development as well as original work.
There a difference in the missions behind Drupal and Pressflow. Drupal provides broad support on even shared web hosts. Pressflow captures the leading performance and scalability edge by using the latest infrastructure advances, and we're willing to break support for older technologies to do that. That means we can move forward faster, but also that Pressflow will never be a system for basic sites.
Internet Retailer: Tool King Rebuilds its eCommerce Site on an Open Source Platform
Internet Retailer has highlighted the recent transition of Tool King, a $25+ Million online retailer to the Open Source Magento Enterprise Edition. The article covers how, Tool King, looking to keep operating costs low, decide to replatform on Magento Enterprise Edition instead of trying to reinvent the wheel and develop a new platform from scratch.
“Building a site from scratch in-house is literally reinventing the wheel and requires a huge amount of time and resources to do correctly, if you can even do it correctly.”
Tool King chose to go with Magento Enterprise Edition due to its value and flexibility which gave them a great platform out of the box coupled with the ability to expand Magento to suit their needs down the line.
“Magento is a solid platform that is flexible enough for our needs, but strong enough to compete with much more expensive e-commerce solutions.”
Tool King is also taking advantage of the Magento BridgeConnect module which allows Tool King to integrate their Microsoft Dynamics ERP with Magento and streamline their back office operations.
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Video: CMS+ Content Management Engine
Magento Enterprise Edition is the premier platform for building an engaging, personalized and flexible eCommerce experience. New Content Management tools, targeted marketing capabilities and streamlined back office integration bring you the innovative features and flexibility to continue to empower your eCommerce vision and goals.
Magento’s CMS+ Content Management Engine opens doors to creation, management and publishing of complex content pages by business users with no technical knowledge. Start by creating pages through “What You See Is What You Get” editing. Easily insert text, images, URL’s, and page links. Even video can be embedded to enhance the storefront. The ability to “version” content gives you the ability to track pages changes and provides more granular control over staging and approving of content before it goes live. Capabilities to create Menu and Page Hierarchies enables categorization of content pages when creating content such as article sections, knowledge bases and other informational pages.
Also, newly introduced are Magento Widgets. Widgets allow you to add configurable page blocks that are made for displaying either dynamic or static content. Add widgets easily, defining type and design or edit preexisting widgets to get just the right look and feel for your site. Define what types of pages a widget should be seen on and even which store views a widget is appropriate for. Insert banners as widgets as well and use Banner management tools allow you to better control promotional images throughout your site and tie them to customer segmentation data as defined in the targeted merchandising suite.
Magento Enterprise Edition, delivering the innovative features you need to power your engaging, personalized and flexible online channel.
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New Mapnik Installer for OSX
Making beautiful custom map tiles keeps getting easier
Setting up Mapnik used to be one of the trickiest parts of our workflow. Dane Springmeyer's recent work on Mapnik Installers for OSX changes that, making it easy to install Mapnik and its needed Python bindings, and allowing for total integration with QGIS and Quantumnik. The setup takes a little more than five minutes. Here's a look at the UI for QuantumGIS, with the Mapnik rendering:
This is important for us and other open source GIS teams. Here is a little background on our internal workflow that lets our cartographer, programmers, and researchers cooperate seamlessly on a project. Typically we'll have a PostGIS enabled database on an Amazon EC2 that our researchers can add data to. Then AJ, our cartographer, can use QGIS to connect to this database and access the data. From there he uses Quantumnik, a QGIS plugin that integrates with Mapnik, to provide a solid GUI for tile design. Then we use TileMill to pre-render complete tilesets, and finally our programmers work to integrate the results into our custom tools. For a detailed visual of our work flow, read Will's post about our tile generation process.
Follow the Magento Staff list on Twitter!
If you’d like to get more insight into the team and operation behind Magento, follow the newly created Magento Staff Twitter list. Lots of great conversations are taking place. See you there!
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Adding Pie Charts to Map Tiles: Using SVG, Inkscape, and Tilecache
Mapping complaint data from the Afghanistan election
In the public release of AfghanistanElectionData.org, which went live in December, we made a unique set tiles displaying pie charts showing official complaints surrounding the recent election in Afghanistan. This data pushed us to expand our tile generating process. Here is a run down of how we piped the data though Inkscape and automated the stylesheet generation for the charts.
First, I'll provide a little background information on the data so you can understand the problem. The complaints made by Afghans to the Electoral Complaints Commission have been categorized by province, and we felt a map would be beneficial in illustrating their distribution. However, each complaint has also been assigned a priority — A, B, and C for high, medium, and low, respectively. This is an interesting distinction within the total numbers, but we didn't have a good way to illustrate it with our existing MapBox tileset workflow.
I came up with a method to generate pie charts using SVG and Inkscape and at the same time generate a Cascadenik stylesheet to render into a set of map tiles. These charts were placed on the map as Mapnik point symbolizers, with their size representing the total number of complaints for that province, and the wedge within representing the distribution of priorities.
Magento Included in Forrester’s ‘Market Overview: Global eCommerce Solutions’ Report
In a recent report released by Forrester Research on the topic of Global eCommerce Solution, Magento was highlighted as ‘unique among the array of different eCommerce technology providers ... [with] traction across the globe, [and] a growing international developer community creating a set of country-specific Web sites, [for such] global clients like The North Face and Skype’.
Global businesses face a variety of challenges in building and operating successful international Web sites. Key to all global initiatives, however, is an internationally savvy technology partner: Businesses must ensure that their eCommerce solutions can handle their evolving global demands. Companies evaluating global vendors will need to assess solution providers’ ability to handle translated, localized content effectively as well as their ability to support additional localization in areas such as currency conversion and payments.
Learn more about the report on Forrester.com
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Magento @ Consumer Electronics Show, Jan 7 Las Vegas
Consumer electronics brands are flocking to Magento and relying on Magento’s flexibility and features to get products into consumers’ hands. With major brands like Vizio, Lenovo and Samsung already on Magento, what are you waiting for?
Members of the Magento team will be at the International Consumer Electronics Show Expo this Thursday January 7th. If you’d like to meet up with members of the Magento Team please email Amit Shah, VP Sales & Business Development at .
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