Chapter 1, Upgrading Drupal, focuses on preparing a Drupal environment for running a high performance Drupal website. We will discuss upgrading Drupal 5.x to Drupal 6.x, creating backups of our site files and databases, running the Drupal Status report, upgrading contributed modules to their latest 6.x versions, and running update.php. We will also tweak our PHP settings using the Drupal settings.php file.

Chapter 2, Maintaining your Drupal Site, covers the basics of maintaining your Drupal website including inspecting your Drupal configuration file, checking your MySQL and PHP configurations, enabling and using the Drupal Update Status module, disabling and uninstalling contributed modules, and clearing the Drupal performance cache and theme registry. We'll also look at running cron jobs, tweaking our php.ini file, and tweaking our .htaccess file.

Chapter 3, Using Development Modules and Tools, focuses on using Drupal development modules and tools such as the Development module. We will look in detail at the Development module's functionality and use it to monitor performance on our site.

Chapter 4, Performance Optimization, focuses on Drupal performance optimization, including throttling modules and blocks through the Development module to generate dummy taxonomy, and content for our site using Views 2.x, and clearing our Views cache.

Chapter 5, Using DB Maintenance and Boost, focuses on using the DB Maintenance and the Boost modules. We'll look in detail at a basic configuration of the Boost module to enhance performance for our anonymous site users.

Chapter 6, Advanced Boost, focuses on using the Boost module to do advanced performance functionality. We'll look at using the Boost module along with Global Redirect and Transliteration, configuring advanced Boost module caching, configuring Boost crawler, and how to check and tweak our Boost .htaccess settings.

Chapter 7, Using Memcache API and Integration, focuses on using the Memcache API and Integration module. We will install a development WAMP environment using MoWeS Portable in this chapter as well as install the Memcached binary libraries, integrate and configure Memcached to work with PHP, and test the module on our development site.

Chapter 8, Advanced Caching and Contributed Modules for Caching, focuses on Advanced Drupal caching and using contributed modules for caching on our site. We will discuss using the Cache Router, Authcache, and Advanced Cache modules.

Chapter 9, Multisite Configuration and Performance, focuses on Drupal multisite configuration and performance. We will create multisite folders and configure our Drupal settings.php for multisite. We will tweak our httpd.conf file to support multisite, and use caching in a multisite environment.

To follow along with the examples in this book, you will need a computer which can run MySQL, PHP, and the Apache web server, which are all prerequisites for Drupal. Luckily, every major operating system can run these applications. You may want to create an account with a website hosting company to test your work although you can also use a regular desktop or a laptop computer.

You will also need the Drupal Content Management framework, which is available from drupal.org. We will discuss downloading and installing Drupal in Chapter 1.

This book is for Drupal website users and developers who want to boost and tweak performance on their website using Drupal's core and contributed performance module functionality.

You are expected to know about the basic operation of Drupal, be familiar with the concept of site configuration, and know how core and contributed modules are installed and work in Drupal. No experience with programming Drupal is required. The author will teach you how to implement specific code and patches that work with specific performance modules. Almost everything in the book will be focused on the module visual interface, and how to use this interface to configure and implement the performance module.

This book also covers upgrading Drupal, running Drupal security patches, creating backups of your Drupal site, and other basic Drupal site maintenance that will be helpful to the novice Drupal user and developer. Modules are covered in both their basic and advanced configurations; so both novice and advanced developer will learn how best to implement performance practices on their Drupal site with this step-by-step guide.

Performance is a large discussion within, and presents a large terrain to cover throughout, the Drupal community, but this book does not claim to cover every performance and site optimization issue. The authors have done their best to cover the majority of performance-based tips and tricks to run your Drupal site. They hope that the book will enhance the discussion of Drupal performance, and pave the way for more books and tutorials to be released on Drupal performance topics.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "Update the $conf in your settings.php file."

A block of code is set as follows:

<?php $conf = array( // The path to wherever memcache.inc is. The easiest is to simply point it // to the copy in your module's directory. // 'cache_inc' => './sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache.inc', // or 'cache_inc' => './sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache.db.inc', ); ?>

New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes, for example, appear in our text like this: "Once enabled, you can browse to this module's admin interface by going to Reports | Memcache status via your administrative menu."

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