This article was automatically recovered from archived versions of this site via the Wayback Machine. It is likely outdated or contains formatting errors, as it has not been reviewed.

Drupal: Session, Cache and other Mysteries

October 1, 2009

drupalwebdesign

Drupal is a nice and massive tool for deploying websites, but not everything is perfect, as we all know:

Session Management: Drupal’s session management is somehow inconsistent. But as I found out later on, it is due to the fact that IE sucks. However, this should be a known problem and the workaround is to have the webserver send specific instructions for the use of the clientside-cache and to use the Boost cachemodule to have a better cache management on the server side. IE for some reason doesn’t listen carefully to Drupal’s default cache-instructions and decides to rather keep certain pages and not check for updated versions. So it might happen that a logged-in user gets the feeling he is not logged in on pages someone else created earlier, thus not being able to edit the content: The page appears to be the public page, no edit buttons. Don’t ask me about the technical details, I had to rely on trial and error to get this working. Module Hell: One huge advantage of Drupal is the ability to deploy a solution for almost and really everything a client might be wanting to put on a website. One huge disadvantage of that is that you need a huge number of modules in your arsenal. I’m currently at around 70 modules for my base-setup. Drupal.org: A huge ressource for information on everything Drupal related, but honestly, it’s quite a pain in the behind to find what you are looking for. There’s just way too much content stored on this website to be effectively able to find what you’re looking for in a short amount of time. If you’re new to the system, it will take you a little while to get used to navigate the site and find out what you can actually do and how. But luckily, you get used to that. :) Drupal Politics: I get the feeling that the community surrounding this project is currently on the edge of an “evolution-step”. There is currently a little bit of tension between different groups. Hopefully that will not cause damage to the ongoing development of the project itself.