Will Hall Online

Choosing the right server for your drupal site can be a difficult process. What specifications do you need, what about connections/ftp/ssh host reliability and such like? With the plethora or hosting packages available on the internet, probably 10,000+ it can be tricky deciding on what may be best for your site. Here are a few pointers that I think about when choosing hosting/servers.

What is the expectations of your hosting provider?

Drupal as a massive extensible CMS has a plethora of useful and frankly fantastic modules. Her are the top ten as I am using them, obviously the drupal site has a list of the most used modules on Drupal, however, I thought I might just suggest my favorites too:

1. Views (it makes the whole database flexible which is obviously invaluable)
2. CCK (make data as you want it)
3. Mollom (brilliant spam detection and easy integration)
4. WYSIWIG (because sometimes it is so much easier)
5. Pathauto (brilliant SEO tool and makes my life easier)

After presenting on 'Migration to Drupal' on Monday 12th April at DrupalCambs, had a few good chats about the nature of the drupal database and associated points.

Potentially, Migration to Drupal, I believe is fairly straighforward depending that you understand both the source and the target data well. Therefore in most cases you need to know your database and the Drupal MySql (or PostgreSql) database. However, for future reference it appears that when using content management systems, there is a belief that you don't need to understand how the data interacts providing that it does.

Recently I have been reading a lot more about NoSQL databases, specifically MongoDB and CouchDB, ad how 2010 will be the year of NoSql. NoSql databases themselves move away from the structure of a relational database, mssql/mysql, and move more toward storing all of their data in views, which can contain a range of information.

Why NoSql?