Dmitry Beloglazov's blog

How to test your Drupal site

Target audience: Drupal site owners and administrators (with no professional Drupal development skills).

So, your contractor has finished working on your site and now you would like to evaluate the quality of the work done. Everything seems fine at the first glance: the site works as expected, no PHP errors are popping up, and the front end does not fall apart. But it does not mean that you have no problems. You may have overlooked something and the errors might appear in the future – with the first site visitors, after module/core updates, or when moving the site to a new platform.

You are not a professional and have no clue in programming and front-end development. How can you estimate is the site is working correctly, without using third-party audit service?

The following modules are required for this task:

  1. Coder

  2. Hacked

  3. Diff

  4. Schema

MusicGearGeeks.com success story

This is a brief article about the performance optimizations we did for a Drupal site of one of our customers - http://musicgeargeeks.com (update: the site seems to be unavailable now, this article was created in 2012).

Initially, the site had serious performance problems. Sometimes it took up to 30 - 40 seconds to load a page. To find the reason, we profiled the code. Our research showed that more than 90% of the time is taken by HTTP requests to third-party servers. After a more detailed study we found out that these requests were addressed to amazon.com, downloading information about the goods displayed on the site. We performed a small test and learned that the amazon module used for downloading data had its own cache, so the reason for such a large number of requests remained unclear. To find the solution for the problem we made a deeper research and found out the following:

Cool hardware & mobile project completed

We've just completed an unusual project which involved assembly of some hardware and building an Android app that interacts with it via Bluetooth.
The hardware device is rather simple - basically it just pairs with Android device via Bluetooth and buzzes when user clicks a button in the app.
It's rather simple yet very cool!

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