Drupal planet - Pixelite

Bots, scrapers, and proxies: defending Drupal sites in an automated internet

Bots are over half of web traffic. Here is the layered defence I use to keep Drupal sites running - companion to my DrupalSouth Wellington 2026 talk.

Drupal

Drupal and the Open Web in the Australian Government - 2024 edition

Have you ever wondered how popular Drupal is in your local state and at the Australian Federal Government level? 2024 edition.

Drupal

Drupal and the Open Web in the Australian Government - 2022 edition

Have you ever wondered how popular Drupal is in your local state and at the Australian Federal Government level?

Fastly

Fastly Soft Purge vs Instant Purge - what is the difference?

What Fastly Soft Purge is, when it is useful, and how to use it.

Drupal

How many JOINs is too many? Tuning optimizer_search_depth for MySQL with Drupal

Drupal is extremely flexible, and creates a highly normalised table structure, 2 tables per field on a piece of content. We were seeing SQL queries appear to never complete when they had lots of JOINs in them.

Drupal

Finding and killing anonymous sessions in Drupal

Sessions in Drupal are created when you log into Drupal. You can however start a session without first authenticating. This is known as an anonymous session

Performance

Preparing for a high traffic event, simple steps to success

The steps that any new launch or high traffic event should go through in order to have the best chance of success.

Drupal

Search API attachments and storing reasonable amounts of data

Search API Attachments has a setting that allows you to store only the most important information in the database.

Drupal

How to add sub tabs under the User profile in Drupal 8

A simple step by step tutorial on adding a custom sub tab in a user's profile in Drupal 8.

Drupal

How the feeds module in Drupal 7 ended up causing MySQL to sever the connection

This is a short story on an interesting problem we were having with the Feeds module and Feeds directory fetcher module in Drupal 7.

Drupal

PHP 7.3 and when you can upgrade your Drupal site

PHP 7.3.0 was released in December 2018, and brings with it a number of improvements in both performance and the language. As always with Drupal you need to strike a balance between adopting these new improvements early and running into issues

Drupal

Custom Cloudflare WAF rules that every Drupal site should run

This blog post helps to summarise some of the default rules I will deploy to every Drupal (7 or 8) site as a base line.

Drupal

JSON:API testing with Cypress

Upgrading JSON:API and Drupal core can be tricky to keep your API intact. Using Cypress is an easy way to have an extra set of eyeballs on the upgrade.

Drupal

10 things I learnt building in Drupal 8

Some of the neat things I have found with Drupal 8 and some of my lessons learned