Book Image

Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites

By : David Mercer
Book Image

Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites

By: David Mercer

Overview of this book

<p>Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems on the internet. Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is already on the way to becoming the de facto standard for CMS Websites. Drupal’s modular design and structured source code make it both highly flexible and easily extended and modified. Drupal is extremely scalable, making it ideal for both a simple personal website as well as an industrial strength commercial or institutional web presence.<br /> <br /> Drupal is a model open source project in that it has a large, friendly community of people who contribute to the project in various ways.&nbsp; Drupal is not only free and easy to use, but this community provides on going mutual support.<br /> <br /> Drupal’s power means choosing an initial pathway can be daunting. The flexibility and power of its content management features mean the right approach needs to be taken.&nbsp; This book takes you from initial set up through site design and creation in a series of carefully structured steps. While there are a few advanced topics that are beyond the scope of the book, all of the core stages of creating a website using Drupal are covered in detail.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Drupal
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Cache and File System Settings


A cache is a storage place where web pages can be held for quick access by the server, without the need to build them from scratch each time. Obviously, this can speed up a site significantly if it is providing pages that require large data retrievals each time. The problem is that a cached page serves an old version of the page, and not the most recent one. This is no problem if you are working with pages which only change once in a while, but if it's important that users are able to see the latest version of a page each time it is requested, then you should not use caching.

So when do we not need caching? For a start, there is no need to use it while you are building your site, because any changes you make while you are setting things up may not display until the cache is flushed—this can lead to no small amount of confusion when you are expecting a change to manifest itself on a page. Accordingly, you should only really enable page caching just before your...