Drupal
Why use Drupal as a development platform?
Drupal is an Open Source Content Management System (CMS), designed for power and flexibility. Boasting one of the biggest professional developer communities, Drupal is quickly becoming one of the leading PHP content management systems in the world. This article explores several key points of Drupal, and the reason why I use it as a base for web solutions.
What is the power of Drupal?
Drupal excels as a CMS and also as a development platform. It has a strong core capable of large flexibility. This means that the system can support many types of features with ease, from shopping carts to user profiles, calendars, galleries and beyond. Drupal can handle just about anything you can imagine. As developers, we embrace this flexibility because it allows us to turn any website dream into reality.
Preventing Drupal from Handling 404s for Performance
The .htaccess file included with Drupal tells Apache to send all 404 requests to Drupal to handle. While this is great in some cases, the performance degradation can have a huge impact on a site that has millions of users.
When Drupal processes a 404, it has to bootstrap Drupal, which includes Apache loading up the PHP process, gathering all of the Drupal PHP files, connecting to the database, and running some queries. This is quite expensive when Apache can be told to simply say "Page not found" without having to incur any of that overhead.
