Aaron Winborn

Vivek Kundra, the CIO of the United States, unveiled the new IT spending dashboards at usaspending.gov earlier this week. Tim O'Reilly has all the details in his blog post titled Radical transparency: the new federal IT dashboard. In short, the dashboards are designed to help CIOs of individual government agencies get a handle on the effectiveness of government IT spending. The site was built with Drupal.

This is a fundamental change in the way government is going to be run, and it is great to see Drupal play a small role in that. Great stuff!

After some feedback from possible participants, we have a new date for our D7 file system, images and media sprint.

The sprint will now run on Sunday-Monday July 26-27 at the Zivtech offices in Philadelphia.

Also, Aaron Winborn will be joining drewish (a.k.a. Andrew Morton) and some Zivtech hackers for the sprint. Anyone else looking for an excuse to visit Philadelphia and hack on core is most welcome.

We've started a Chipin so we can help get Jon Stacey down from Nebraska to Philadelphia for the sprint - all donations welcome!

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Yesterday we took the beta-wraps off of Acquia Search, and I followed up with a post about why Acquia Search matters for site visitors. We're still having some good discussions in the comments and the Twitter-sphere, but today I want to talk a bit more about the technical details. How does Acquia Search work, what does our infrastructure look like, and why is it a great deal for site owners?

Acquia Search is a hosted search service based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The way it works is that Drupal sites push their content to the search servers hosted by Acquia. We index the content, build an index, and handle search queries. We provide the search results, facets, and content recommendations to your Drupal site over the network.

Your site's data is protected in transit by SSL and by HMAC authentication in the Acquia Network. Plain english? The data is encrypted so anyone snooping in the middle can't read it and the request is authenticated which means that the Acquia Network knows you sent the request you claimed to, and you know that messages received from the network are legitimate.

Acquia Search is built using the Open Source Lucene and Solr distributions from the Apache project. If you want to install, run and maintain Lucene and Solr yourself, and you have the resources to do so, you can. All the code, including our contributions to the Apache Solr integration modules for Drupal, are available as Open Source.

However, many organizations simply lack the Java expertise to deploy, manage and scale Java applications -- or their hosting environment may not accommodate it. Because Acquia Search is a hosted service, it takes away the burden of installation, configuration, and operational duties to keep the software fast, secure and up-to-date. That's our job.

As a reference, we've spent the last 9 months developing Acquia Search with the equivalent of three full-time employees. This also included setting up a billing system, integrating our support system, connecting it to the Acquia Network, performance testing and tuning, and more. Other Acquians helped out with the infrastructure, quality assurance, product management, design, and documentation. It was a non-trivial amount of work.

The result of these efforts is that we can launch any number of Solr farms on Amazon EC2. For high-performance and high-availability, each farm has a master Solr server and one or more slave Solr servers. A load balancer pushes content changes to the master Solr server, which are replicated by the slave servers. The load balancer makes sure that most regular search queries are done against the slave servers. Because multiple servers can handle your site's search requests, Acquia Search is fast and can scale, but it also means that Acquia Search is very robust because it can survive a server failure. As I wrote yesterday, Acquia Search is faster that Drupal's built-in search -- especially for large sites.

In most scenarios, several Drupal sites share a single Solr farm -- by sharing resources, we can offer a high-performance and high-availability search solution to small sites at relative cheap price point. For really big sites, we can provision a dedicated farm and scale out Solr so that it can handle millions of search queries.

Once you begin to use our search service you'll be able to disable Drupal's built-in core search. When you do this you reduce the amount of memory and processing power needed by your own infrastructure. As we've learned with big sites like drupal.org, Drupal's built-in search can bring a large site to its knees. With Acquia Search, you can avoid the drain.

On the front-end, we made significant contributions to the Apache Solr Search Integration modules on drupal.org. We helped add new features, improve the usability, and iron out a legion of bugs that cropped up during the beta period. The top-3 most active maintainers of the Apache Solr module are all Acquia employees, respectively Peter Wolanin, Robert Douglass, and Jacob Singh. As a result, Peter, Robert and Jacob are sometimes referred to as Acquia's three Apache Solr Musketeers.

Peter Wolanin (pwolanin), Robert Douglass and Jacob Singh work on Apache Solr integration as part of their job at Acquia. Peter and Jacob are part of the engineering team, but Robert can provide professional services related to Apache Solr.

All things combined, Acquia Search makes it staggeringly simple and low-cost to get better search on your site. You can get started in minutes and you don't have to worry about installing, upgrading, monitoring, or scaling the software. In short, we built an enterprise-quality, highly-available, secure, scalable, and fast indexing search solution that we believe Drupal was missing -- especially for the enterprise.

Drupal Camp Philadelphia is coming up on July 31st!

Last night we had a barn raising to quickly put up a site for the event at http://drupaldelphia.com.

In attendance were Ivan Boothe of http://rootwork.org, Mason Wendell of http://canarypromo.com and Howard and myself from Zivtech. With the help of Mason's beautiful theme and logo for the site, we got the basics of the site going after work.

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Why will the visitors of your site care about Acquia Search? For a while now, I have Acquia Search installed on my personal site. To understand what Acquia Search can do for your site, have a look at what it has done for my site. While I have a very simple Drupal site, you should be able to experience some of the benefits of Acquia Search.

For example, search for "Drupal" on my site (use the search widget in the sidebar) and you can see the facets that allow you to filter the results by topic, location and industry. Using these facets, it should be pretty easy to find all the Fortune 500 Drupal sites that I blogged about in 2009, for example. Facets make search faster, making it very easy for your visitor to drill into results and to find what they are looking for.

Screenshot of Acquia Search's facet-based navigation as used on buytaert.net.

Acquia Search makes search easier because it is built on the principles of progressive disclosure. Instead of showing the visitor an initial page with lots of complicated options (see Drupal's advanced search options that almost no one uses), the facets are only shown after the initial search query. Plus, and this is really cool, facets are dynamically generated based on the search keywords. As such, they are relevant to what you're searching for.

Acquia Search provides a more powerful search because it is based on the renowned open source Lucene and Solr technologies from the Apache project. Not only do they sport better search algorithms, advanced content normalization, and a "did you mean?" feature, they also come with other great features such as word stemming, document search, range queries and more.

My favorite feature of Acquia Search, at least for use on this blog, is the "more like this" feature -- on node pages you can ask Acquia Search to suggest related content. I have been using it on my site for a while (see the block in the sidebar), and it has helped to keep visitors on my site longer. I occasionally find myself getting side-tracked by the "related links" -- it is a great way to re-discover old posts.

Screenshot of Acquia Search's content recommendations as used on buytaert.net.

Last but not least, our new service makes for better performance. We performed tests of searches on a Drupal site with over 10,000 nodes of content using a 3.2Ghz dual core server with 1.7 GB of RAM. With Acquia Search results were displayed in less than half a second, whereas the same results served from Drupal's built-in search took anywhere from 1.5 to 7.7 seconds. On the web, faster is better.

That makes for a lot of good reasons why the visitors of your site might care about Acquia Search. Tomorrow, I plan to write a more technical blog post about how Acquia Search works, how we made it that fast, and why it matters to site administrators (instead of site visitors). In the mean time, I recommend that you play around with the search feature on my site or that you sign up for a trial subscription. Have fun!

It's a big day for us at Acquia. We finally took the beta-wraps off of Acquia Search, and made it available commercially as part of the Acquia Network. Thanks to the 250+ beta testers who helped make our hosted search service fit for use in production environments, including Brightcove, JackBe Developer Community, P-O-P Design, Wide Divots and others.

We used the beta period to look at the usage statistics, costs, and to talk to a lot of beta users to figure out the best pricing model for this service. We decided on the following:

Acquia Search is included for no additional cost in every Acquia Network subscription. Basic and Professional subscribers have one "search slice" and Enterprise subscribers have five "search slices". A slice includes the processing power to index your site, to do index updates, to store your index, and to process your site visitors' search queries. Each slice includes 10MB of indexing space - enough for a site with between 1,000 and 2,000 nodes. Customers who exceed the level included with their subscription may purchase additional slices. A ten-slice extension package costs an additional $1,000/year, and will cover an additional 10,000 - 20,000 nodes in an index of 100MB.

For my personal blog, which has about 900 nodes at the time of this writing, a Basic Acquia Network subscription ($349 USD/year) would give me all the benefits of Acquia Search, plus all the other Acquia Network services.

For some of you, this might sound like a lot of money, but we believe you get a lot of value in return. In my next couple of blog posts, I plan to outline the benefits of Acquia Search to your site visitors and to Drupal site administrators. Stay tuned!

Working for a large organization, it should be no surprise to all that my workplace is going down the SharePoint path for its "enterprise software" solution. What may be surprising to some is that SharePoint confuses me.

Is SharePoint a document management system or a content management system? Every executive touts using SharePoint's collaboration features, but behind closed doors I only hear whispers that those collaboration tools aren't so great. I'm told Sharepoint is a cheap solution to implement, yet over the years I have never heard a CIO actually tell me they're saving money using SharePoint. Then there is the Microsoft Sharepoint licensing agreements. Every time I read a Microsoft license I can't help but wonder if I'm on a road that doesn't offer my organization appropriate exit ramps.

Luckily, there are people like Russ Edelman to help better explain the SharePoint experience to me. Russ Edelman is president of Corridor Consulting whose company is co-founder of SharePointGovernance.Org. Edelman has written one of the best articles I've read on identifying the needed resourses necessary to support SharePoint, Determining the True Cost of Microsoft SharePoint.

Indeed, the true costs of deploying and supporting SharePoint are not well understood. Fundamental misconceptions about SharePoint prevent organizations from deploying it effectively and realizing its value. Many IT executives view SharePoint as a shrink-wrapped product that can be installed and configured in hours or days. In fact, it cannot. SharePoint is truly an enterprise information platform and must be treated as such. That means SharePoint configuration work needs to be well-planned and designed—not conducted in an ad-hoc fashion.

I encourage you to read the article as Edelman does a good job in explaining the various resources that are needed to adequately support Sharepoint. Now that I'm less confused about SharePoint, can someone help me to be less worried?

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Michael Jackson died.
Within 24 hours we built and launched a custom application for him that lives on a cloud.
It gets about 100 posts per minute. As of this moment the app contains 347,144 memories from Michael Jackson fans worldwide...
and a crapload of spam.
and a lot of posts from disturbed individuals.

http://www.michaeljackson.com/

I heart the Jackson 5 on vinyl.

ps this is the first thing not Drupal I have worked on since i can't remember when.

Technology Utilizes Hadoop-based Architectures to Support Processing of Massive Data Sets to Deliver Dynamic and Optimized Websites

Mineola, NY – June 29, 2009 - FatWire Software, the leading web experience management (WEM) provider, today announced new releases of FatWire Engage 7.5 for personalization and FatWire Analytics 2.5 for web content optimization.  In conjunction with the FatWire Content Server web content management platform, FatWire Engage and FatWire Analytics deliver targeted and optimized web content with a scale and sophistication that exceeds the needs of the largest global businesses.

Website personalization and optimization are critical capabilities for organizations to effectively and efficiently compete for customers today.  Website personalization based on customer segmentation enables marketers to create a web experience that is automatically tailored and specifically relevant to each site visitor.  Web content analytics enables marketers to measure and optimize the content they offer to each customer segment. With these capabilities, companies can engage customers and prospects with targeted information, improving customer loyalty, and driving sales and repeat visitors.

FatWire Engage is a sophisticated rules engine for creating customer segments as well as assigning targeted content and promotions to be delivered online to each segment. Visitors to FatWire-powered websites are automatically identified as part of a segment based on either known information about the user, their behavior on the website, or a combination of the two.  Marketers can create extensive online campaigns that are precisely targeted for visitors based on membership in multiple overlapping segments. With this new release, FatWire Engage now delivers up to two billion targeted page views per month in conjunction with Content Server with a single install of the FatWire Engage solution.

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Our June Trainings are over and we are thrilled how things went. The Cira Center was an awesome venue and the participants were great as well. We are always looking to improve so the feedback we got was really helpful and we thank those attendees who took the time.

A couple of notes of interest:

Acquia Installer Rocks! training1.jpg training3.JPG

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Lots of people do interesting things once they've jail-breaked their iPhone. Dan Poltawski is no exception when he tries to turn his once client-only device into a Moodle Server.

Having ended up with a spare iPhone from a recent upgrade I decided to try jail-breaking the old one and see what software was out there away from the restrictions of the app store. I discovered that lighttpd, php and sqlite were all available from the software repositories for download - these three combined are enough to run a Moodle server. So out the window went cleaning my flat and sensible tasks - I had to make my phone into a Moodle server!

Once you start reading the article you will find that his first attempt at installing and using Moodle on his iPhone wasn't that successful. Still, Moodle on the iPhone is an interesting concept. To say the least, the concept is much more interesting than the YouTube video he provides of his experience. Dan, couldn't you at least added some background music or some audio of you swearing at your iPhone?

The New York Times: "Times executives believed that publicity would raise Mr. Rohde's value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival. Persuading another publication or a broadcaster not to report the kidnapping usually meant just a phone call from one editor to another, said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times.

But Wikipedia, which operates under the philosophy that anyone can be an editor, and that all information should be public, is a vastly different world."

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Don't look her in the eye or you'll turn into a dogggie snack.

Adam Mordecai
Partner - Advomatic, LLC

Warning: This post may be proof that I'm guilty of narcissism.

Sometimes I can't help myself from saying some of the darnedest things via Twitter or comments in other people's blogs. I'm extremely proud of the comment I posted in this Gadgetopia article regarding Google and PHP.

This is a perfect example for why I say it's better to claim you know nothing instead of something.

When you claim you know something there is always someone bound to prove you know nothing. When you claim you know nothing there are always people out there that assume you know a lot more than you know.

Over the years I've become a genius by knowing nothing.

Zivtech is hosting a code sprint on July 24-25 at our offices in Philadelphia.

The sprint will focus on:

• getting PHP stream wrapper support in core
• getting image cache in core
• other media and file improvements for D7

Apart from Zivtech hackers, drewish (a.k.a. Andrew Morton) will be there. Anyone else looking for an excuse to visit Philadelphia and hack on core is most welcome.

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If you've visited CMS Report lately, you likely noticed that we're sporting a new look and feel. Over the years, I've used various Drupal themes and many of those themes were made available for free at Drupal.org. For the past couple years, I used RoopleTheme's LiteJazz. LiteJazz spoiled me. The theme was so well designed that I don't recall having to do the usual hacks to the templates or CSS styles to make it a good fit for CMSReport.com. Thanks RoopleTheme!

Today, I'm using the Extreme Updates. The free theme is designed by Template World and ported to Drupal by 3rdWorld. In my opinion, the Extreme Updates theme has a few flaws in its design that I'm needing to fix. You'll have to be patient with me because I'm not much of a designer. Luckily, the theme utilizes the impressive Genesis package, a start theme for Drupal 6. This is the very first time I've used a Genesis theme but I'm just as impressed with Genesis as I was when I first used Zen, another starter theme for Drupal.

This time around when considering a new theme, I also did something I've never done before. I considered spending money for a theme. In the past, CMSReport.com has never generated the revenue I needed to justify hiring a Drupal service company to design a theme for my site. However, something interesting has happened in the Drupal community, a number of design companies have started to design and sell themes geared toward the smaller Drupal sites like mine.

The availability of quality themes by such companies as community favorite TopNotchThemes shows just how much the Drupal ecosystem has matured over the years. Doesn't it seem just like yesterday when the biggest complaint about Drupal was that there were no good themes available? The future for Drupal theme development looks very bright. My understanding is that there are a number of changes in Drupal 7 that will make the web designers very happy. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to see in 2010 the quantity of available Drupal themes reach toward the same numbers that we've seen for Wordpress and Joomla!.

Changing to a new theme also marks the beginning of my desire to move CMSReport.com into some new directions. I want this site to have a more professional and community feel to it. I'm personally tired of reading mostly my own posts here and I think it's time to get a lot more author's involved. These changes will be progressive over the coming months, but won't be settled until the arrival of Drupal 7. As has been since Drupal 4.6, I've always geared the features in my sites to allow for a quick upgrade to the latest version of Drupal. Similar to the past, you just might see this site running a beta or release candiate of Drupal 7 by the end of the year.

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I wasn't able to attend the DrupalCamp Copenhagen that took place May 22-24, 2009. The good Danes thought of me anyway, though, and sent me this birthday wish. Thanks Morten and Jakob, and all the other Drupallers! (look closely and you can see that I turned 22 years old this year.)

Not sure if I'm early or late to the party, but I just discovered Mixergy.com. Mixergy is a place where 20ish Andrew Warner wants to help ambitious people who love business as much as he does to learn from a mix of experienced mentors. Somebody on the Internet wanting to help you make money, imagine that.

However Mixergy has something that many sites don't have...fantastic interviews of some very influential Web people. Some of the videos that caught my attention included interviews of Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and most recently, Roy Rubin of Magento. I recommend checking Mixergy.com out.

In this two-part article we learn a few methods for enhancing user experience and making your WordPress blog a better place. In this part, we see how to use paginator, highlight searched text in search results, and use the CSS sliding doors technique within WordPress.In the second part we will create a dropdown menu for your categories, add a breadcrumb to your theme, display related posts and tabs on your sidebar.

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Believe it or not, I was really close to scratching CMS Made Simple out of my CMS Focus "Top 30" list. Nothing against CMS Made Simple but it's just been difficult to report a lot of newsworthy events. So wouldn't you know it, here comes along CMS Made Simple 1.6 to keep the CMS in focus here at CMS Report.

Some of the new features and enhancements brought into CMS Made Simple 1.6 include:

• Content Type Changes - Major effort has been undertaken to make the system faster, better and easier to extend.
• Permissions Changes - The developers completely re-worked the content permissions to allow more flexibility, and allow greater control over what users are allowed to do with respect to content.
• New Themes and Content - Two new front-end themes have been developed, and the default content for new installations changed considerably.
• Forgot Password functionality in admin - The admin console now has the ability to handle forgotten passwords, if an email address has been associated with the admin account.
• 404 error handling changes - A new content type ‘Error Handler’ has been created to handle 404 errors.
• Site Preferences rewrite
• Site down IP address exclusion - When sitedown mode is enabled, it is now possible to exclude certain IP addresses from that restriction.
• Improvements/Enhancements - Including MenuManager, TinyMCE, Search, and Printing

Additional details can be found at CMSMadeSimple.org.