Improve Drupal Performance 400% using the Boost Module

When developing Drupal websites, you will start to notice performance bumps when adding more and more modules to your site. Soon enough as your website gets more complicated, those performance flaws get magnified. One very essential module you should install into your Drupal site is the Boost module.

Must Read for Web Designers - 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines

I just stumbled upon this today and I wish I've read this before: 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines. Smashing Magazine has compiled what I think are some of the most important guidelines in creating your web design more effective. I have yet to implement these on my next projects, but for those of you who are curious, here are the main points discussed in the article:

Quick and Easy Javascript Form Validation

If you need a quick javascript form validation script, you can use this one from Javascript-coder.com. Its pretty easy to implement and I've used it in some of my projects already. Its gonna save you some time coding from scratch!

Drupal - How to Diagnose a Blank White Screen: White Screen of Death (WSOD)

While developing a Drupal website, I was testing out the created pages and suddenly on one page, nothing was loaded. There was just a blank white page - more appropriately called the Drupal White Screen of Death or WSOD. First step I did was to enable error reporting because there might also be problems with the template I was customizing:

20+ WordPress Codes You Might Need On Your Next Project

Undeniably, WordPress has been a premiere choice by web designers and internet publishers as their main blogging platform. One of the considerations of their choice is the flexibility of Wordpress and easy customization of templates. Also, a lot of resources are available online on how to make the popular platform even more. Here are 20+ WordPress Codes that you can use on your next WordPress project. 

How to Control Two Computers with only One Mouse & Keyboard Without Using a KVM

I've been using this technique when I needed to control my computer but at the same time use a laptop on the side for other specific tasks. The software is called Synergy+. Here are some of the key features of this great piece of free program to use only one set of mouse and keyboard across multiple computers and even with different OSes (Linux/Mac/Windows):

How to Upgrade PHP to 5.2 in CentOS

Developing a Drupal community site has been really good for a while until I needed to search a module to integrate Facebook Connect with it. I found this module specifically for that. Unfortunately, it requires PHP version 5.2, but the one on the Godaddy VPS (which is by default a CentOS flavor) is 5.1 I think. I needed to upgrade the PHP version to 5.2, and the best possible way is to install the latest rpm for CentOS and do a yum update. Here were the steps I did:

9 Tips for Improving Drupal Performance

I've started working on a Drupal Project just last month and although the learning curve is quite steep, its also a good thing that I chose the Drupal System over others like Joomla and Wordpress for building something like an article submission site. Drupal is very advanced & flexible since its got a ton of available modules and themes. But it also entails some performance drawbacks if you continue to develop a Drupal website without thinking of performance optimization. And with that, here are 9 tips for improving Drupal performance:

Create multiple-step forms using CCK Fieldgroups in Drupal

Lately I've been working on a Drupal project, and one aspect in our priority list is the user-friendliness for the people who will submit their contents to the site. A good solution would be to divide the submission form into different steps so that the form page would not be so crowded. Thanks to David Newker for his solution on how to create muliple step forms using CCK Fieldgroups in Drupal. Here are the instructions I followed:

How to optimize GoDaddy Virtual Private Server - Kill Tomcat & Simple Control Panel

While searching for some optimization tips for Virtual Private Servers, I checked out this post which claimed that Godaddy (ahem) VPS sucked BUT offering a solution to those who were on the same boat (in this case, I).  Luckily, I tried out his solution and it has proven to speed up the Godaddy VPS.

To give an overview of our setup, we have a few (like 20 ?) websites hosted on the GoDaddy server and its occasionally bugging down. One optimization I did was to kill some processes that are not needed most of the time which takes up a few MBs of RAM from the server.

So here is the solution that I implemented on the said VPS as suggested by Colin McNamara - basically to stop the Apache Tomcat and Godaddy Simple Control Panel, which are used very rarely. But of course, if you need to use the Simple Control Panel, you can always start it up again then turn it off when you are done.

Here are the steps: