Will Hall Online

I have been reading a bit recently about how speed is going to become very relevent in search engines results. And I do no mean merely the speed of the web server/site. Speed to me means two sepearte things. Both the speed of the site, and the speed which you can get your article/posting/page listed in search results.

1. Page Speed
I have been recently working on getting a few of my sites running quicker. Apparently Amazon suggests that you lose a 10% of customers for every 100 ms extra that your site takes to load over 200ms. That means that speed is important.

I was recently asked the question of how applicable Drupal/Joomla are for a large site. Here is my answer:

I have attempted to break down your points to make answering some of your questions easier. I have been developing with Joomla and Drupal for over 2 years and have created around 20 joomla sites and 20 drupal sites, one of which is a 15 site multisite.

1. Complex(but user friendly) navigation/categorisation

Just been hacking away at this to get the idea across of migrating and validating data from one database into the drupal core. Ite relys on the user having created a content type of news from CCK.


<?php
mysql_connect('localhost', 'user', 'password') or die('Cannot connect to MySql');
mysql_select_db('database') or die('Cannot connect to database');

// get the required data from the database
$sql = 'select * from tableName';
$query = mysql_query($sql);

// give it a timestamp
$unixTimestamp = 1230800640; //starting unix timestamp

Obviously, the question as to why people are using it is one that can be prompted with a number of answers, yet I will put my few points down:

• The backend/administration is understandable

This can be a big problem, especially when using CMS for no IT professional, which I guess I would class myself as. Joomla has a relatively smooth and easy learning curve to being able to publish articles and create users/emails all fro its backend. Especially in contrast to Drupal which can require slightly more knowledge.

• It is ready to go straght away