pligg

Should you use Drupal or Wordpress?

Submitted by tomo on October 13, 2012 - 11:35pm

Before I begin: I'm a Drupal guy. What I say could be construed as being biased. I'll try to be honest though.

When building a website you or your developers have some decisions to make: what language to use, whether to use a framework and which one (depending on language - Zend/CodeIgniter/Symfony/CakePHP for PHP, Ruby on Rails, Django for Python, etc.), whether to use a CMS (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal), whether to self-host or use a blogging service (WordPress.com, Drupal Gardens, Tumblr, Blogger). There is no single right answer.

First, go with the language that is most comfortable. Previously, I had several years experience with both PHP and Python with Python actually being more recent. But few people in Vietnam know Python where many know PHP. But Drupal being in PHP sealed the deal.

Next, is it mostly about managing news-like content? Then go with a blog. Does it need some popular features like user logins and full accounts, social media integration, voting, storing meta-information besides blog text, or otherwise some customization of what kind of content you are storing? Then it's no longer a blog and you should use Drupal. Is it purely ecommerce? Drupal Commerce or Ubercart can do the job, but Magento might be all you need if you are not a developer and as long as you can afford to buy the yearly license fee for it and your website only needs a store of physical items without any other content or custom design.

Do you need something that is more like a web app that's unlike any existing blog, news site, social media site, online store, or corporate website out there? Then maybe you should have a team of developers starting with a web framework (Drupal, as well as being a content management system, is also a content management framework) and start from more basic building blocks.

Some specific use cases:

1) An intranet website for managing some internal corporate data that is really custom to your company. WordPress would not be adequate none of its strong points would apply. Drupal's theming weak points would no longer hurt you here since you just need a professional-looking tool. Best of all Drupal easily gives you and novice users a way to manage your data.

2) Brochure website - like a business card for a store or business with a dozen or so pages of information and some links and a contact form. If you don't already know Drupal then use WordPress. WordPress also has many available commercial themes which can be used. However, a Drupal expert can just as quickly and easily build brochure sites in Drupal.

3) Social network - There are open source packages that are like social-network-in-a-box solutions. But nowadays, social networking is a feature, not a sufficient product alone. In my experience, using these off the shelf packages ends up being too limiting because you will always want to do new things and come up against the limits of the software, even if its open source. This applies to social news software like Pligg, school software like OpenSIS, Open Source Q&A software, forums like vBulletin, etc. Those kinds of sites were once novel and rare but are now just features to be added to larger sites, but they can not reasonable be used to build those larger sites.

WordPress's strong points:

1) Being a blog. It does one thing really well. I have run many WordPress blogs in the past. This blog is built with Drupal though because it's possible to blog with Drupal, and because I've also extended it far beyond blogging with many experiments.

2) Availability of commercial themes. There are a lot of companies making and selling themes for WordPress (this is also a point where Joomla wins over Drupal). There are also plenty of free themes. This is good for people who don't want to put money down on a fully custom design yet and are just happy to use something that looks professional.

3) Usability. Out of the box, WordPress is user friendly and makes it easy to get up and running. Drupal improves at this with every major version but is still something a developer more easily loves than an end user.

Honorable mentions

Mezzanine (http://mezzanine.jupo.org/) is a promising-looking CMS built with Django/Python. If you like Python (like I do) then consider giving it a shot, although it doesn't have nearly the depth and breadth of free modules that Drupal offers nor the size of community.

Cartridge (http://cartridge.jupo.org) is Mezzanine's ecommerce/shopping cart solution. Again, you won't get the community and support like you would with Ubercart but at least you would get to hack in Python!

Pliggmeme Redux Pligg Theme

Submitted by tomo on January 17, 2011 - 2:21pm

Pliggmeme Redux is a slightly modified, debugged and fixed, and despammed version of the Pliggmeme theme for Pligg. The original Pliggmeme was inspired by Tweetmeme and based on skins4webs's Silverbullet theme. The new Pliggmeme was made for the Detroit Institute of Techno.

Some shady hidden spam was removed, some JavaScript was fixed, and you can actual submit stories and make comments now. This works with Pligg 1.1.3.

Attachments: 
application/zip icon
pliggmeme.zip
image/png icon
pliggmemedit.png
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Sorting broken after upgrading Pligg

Submitted by tomo on January 6, 2011 - 7:36am

If, after upgrading from an old version of Pligg to 1.1.2, you notice that the front page is sorted completely backwards and you can't change the sorting even by fiddling with the sort-query code in index.php, it may be because of the new Groups feature. A new groups table has been added and all queries join this table but the Pligg upgrader only creates the table and sets the new link_group_id to 0 for all rows in links. The solution is to populate the groups table. An easy way is to head to groups/submit/ and create a generic catchall group. Then in your database, change the group_id for the newly created row in groups to 0 (if it's 1).

If the Pligg group submitter is broken (as Pligg is prone to be buggy) then just:
INSERT INTO groups (group_id) VALUES (1);

Now those queries like:

SELECT link_id FROM links LEFT JOIN groups ON links.link_group_id = groups.group_id WHERE link_status='published' AND (groups.group_privacy!='private' OR ISNULL(groups.group_privacy) OR groups.group_id IN(1)) GROUP BY link_id ORDER BY link_published_date DESC, link_date DESC LIMIT 0,10

will work again!

Pligg long running queries

Submitted by tomo on September 7, 2010 - 2:20am

 

 

For awhile I've been plagued with these long running queries on my Pligg site that were running up CPU:
 
SELECT DISTINCT pv_user_id, pv_type, pv_page_id FROM mypligg_pageviews GROUP BY pv_type, pv_page_id, pv
 
And so I was running the mkill Perl script to kill any queries taking longer than a minute to complete.
But recently even that stopped working, leaving queries in the Killed state but still running up CPU.  They were all stuck in "converting HEAP to MyISAM".  Did some diagnostics:
 
mysql> SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE 'Created_tmp_tables';
+--------------------+-------+
| Variable_name      | Value |
+--------------------+-------+
| Created_tmp_tables | 196   |
+--------------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
 
mysql> SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE 'Created_tmp_disk_tables';
+-------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name           | Value |
+-------------------------+-------+
| Created_tmp_disk_tables | 159   |
+-------------------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
 
mysql> show variables like 'tmp_table_size';
+----------------+----------+
| Variable_name  | Value    |
+----------------+----------+
| tmp_table_size | 33554432 |
+----------------+----------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
 
 
So it seemed there wasn't enough memory to perform the conversion without going to disk which is not what we want.  So I set tmp_table_size and max_heap_table_size to larger values, max_heap_table_size too because MySQL uses the lesser of the two.
 
mysql> set tmp_table_size=100000000;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> set  max_heap_table_size=100000000;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
 

And now we're golden, CPU back down to normal levels and queries finishing.

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About the author

Asian-American expat living in Vietnam over 3 years. I am involved in tech startups and do Drupal consulting. I choose to live in Saigon and Vietnam and I want to see the city and its people reach their true potential.

Where is Saigon?

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Saigon is the name of the city now officially known as Ho Chi Minh City. But most people who call Saigon home call their home Saigon and it's mostly tourists who I hear refer to it as Ho Chi Minh City (or Ho Chi Minh Ville for the French).

After the Vietnam/American War ended in 1975, many place names ceased to exist such as Saigon, South Vietnam, and plenty of street names.

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Those who haven't seen Vietnam for decades will be confused not just by the geographical changes but the incredible amount of development and modernization that has since taken place.

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