This past week, I was chatting with my friend - and ex-boss - Chris Fuller (cfuller12) from Optaros about caching pages for authenticated users.  He'd been implementing authcache to cache pages for his latest deployment but was going to need to do some tweaking to get dynamic aspects of the page working for logged in users.  I've been busy writing proposals and keeping the Achieve-machine moving forward so the development challenge was a great reason to do something

NAMM (the International Music Products Association) launched their WannaPlayMusic.com site this week, coinciding with Music Week, May 5th through the 9th.

Achieve's own Bill O'Connor (Drupal user csevb10) will participating as a mentor in this year's Drupal Summer of Code aggregator project. Bill has done substantial work on the Drupal Simplefeed module, working closely with Ted Serbinski (m3avrck) on a major overhaul in the summer of 2006 and the Drupal 6 upgrade earlier this year.

Drupal earns another feather in it's cap today with the announcement of the Webware 100 awards. The Drupal CMS is one of the nine finalists in the "Photos and Pubishing" category, selected by Webware and voted on by over two million Web 2.0 application users.

I have been working on upgrading the caching contrib modules to Drupal 6 and started to notice some patterns and duplicated code, which led me to think Drupal's approach to caching in general. We currently have a fairly limited API for caching, but we have a magic bullet that helps us overcome some of these weaknesses: the cache.inc override system. Anyone who has spent time on large production sites knows that one of the easiest ways to see better performance on your Drupal system is to use one of the existing cache mechanisms that I spoke about at Drupalcon Boston.

Achieve Internet is proud to have been an integral part of the development process for the new FastCompany.com business community site. We provided custom Drupal software development and project management leadership to deliver a world-class union of award winning journalism and online community. The site incorporates a professional grade content management system and editorial workflow controls, along with a full suite of cutting edge Web 2.0 applications.

I am very happy to announce the release of Memcache 1.7 for Drupal.  The most notable improvement being the addition of pluggable sessions for memcache.  Memcache is an instrumental module for scaling Drupal sites and we now have a release that is more stable than ever. 

The thought of using an open source platform for a professional deployment within a demanding enterprise brings to mind a harrying array of possibilities: programmers unable to see the business issues and work as part of a team, a lack of documentation, hacked code and non-existent project management skills. Well, not anymore.

Social networking is not a new term, nor has it been widely applied to websites for more than a few years, yet it has clearly become one of the biggest buzz phrases of the Web 2.0 era. Nonetheless a great deal of confusion exists about just what makes a particular site an online social network. Of course, there's more than one answer, but most of us know this type of site when we see one, so clearly there are some common features that must be easy to recognize.

According to Wikipedia (in many ways an online social network in its own right):

One of the great things about using open source code for projects is the opportunity to contribute back to the community and get a little recognition for your hard work. Just like the code though, there's a "Drupal way" for patch contribution and the goal of this article is to help you expedite your plan to contribute module patches back to the community and to limit the difficulty you will have in getting those patches accepted.

1. Pulling the latest code.