Drupal technical introduction
It’s quite old, but as it describes core functionality, it should be still actual.

Please comment if you know of any other good high-quality technical Drupal introductions/descriptions.

ExpressionEngine (EE) by EllisLab (see dislaimer). EE is available both as free and as paid-for: free has somewhat limited functionality, but enough to start the simple news site or blog. ExpressionEngine is suitable both for content-centric and news-centric (blog-like) projects, though in my opinion it’s more geared towards news/blog-like sites.
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Today I moved my blog and gallery into MySQL5 databases from an elderly MySQL4. Also, both WP and gallery are now updated to the latest versions. Soon I’ll change the WP and G2 themes – for the lighter, less cluttered – and will remove some ads… and will also add some others instead

Update generally went well, except for the message I got on the main page:

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.

It was quite easy to figure out that new WP conflicts with an elderly “Sideblog” plugin – so I had to deactivate that one, and will have to update all the active plugins to avoid some other less evident problems… (actually, just completed updating all the plugins… quite a time-eater, that was.)

Also, there will be a slight change to what and how I write. No other details for now – but stay tuned! All the changes with no exceptions are planned for the good of readers, and for the users’ benefits!

Updated on Apr 8, 2008.

Stimulated by the post of Eric Daniel (who used to have a blog at termitenshort.com), I compiled the most recent ffmpeg SVN source into Linux binary, which runs fine on my shared hosting (note: I’m using older ffmpeg binaries, which are at the end of the post).

mini-FAQ:
Q: Why the title has “for Gallery2″?
A: Just because I avoided the inclusion of libraries, which were not found on my shared hosting server. I hope this will work for other shared hosting environments.

Configuration, version and date can be found in the output of ffmpeg.

Versions built on April, 8, 2008:
ffmpeg (no lame) (checked: can be executed on godaddy shared hosting)

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 15:13:14, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)
usage: ffmpeg [[infile options] -i infile]… {[outfile options] outfile}…

ffmpeg (with lame). For this one, grab libmp3lame.so.

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6 –enable-libmp3lame
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 15:44:31, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)

Based on single request: ffmpeg (with lame and libfaac and libfaad). For this one, grab libfaac.so and libfaad.so.

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6 –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libfaac –enable-libfaad
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 23:53:57, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)

As an experiment, here’s ffmpeg freebsd binary without lame support. Did ran on some FreeBSD 6.3 hosting.

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6 –target-os=freebsd
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 16:15:38, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)

Versions built on Ocotber, 28, 2007:
download ffmpeg without libmp3lame support

FFmpeg version SVN-r10867, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-pp –enable-swscaler –enable-pthreads

–enable-libogg –enable-libvorbis –disable-debug
libavutil version: 49.5.0
libavcodec version: 51.47.1
libavformat version: 51.17.0
built on Oct 28 2007 22:46:10, gcc: 3.4.6

download ffmpeg with libmp3lame support

FFmpeg version SVN-r10867, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-pp –enable-swscaler –enable-libmp3lame

–enable-pthreads –enable-libogg –enable-libvorbis –disable-debug
libavutil version: 49.5.0
libavcodec version: 51.47.1
libavformat version: 51.17.0
built on Oct 28 2007 23:04:59, gcc: 3.4.6

Shared hosting testing reports are welcome.

Below you can find even older versions of ffmpeg, which were tested and found functional on GoDaddy shared hosting.
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Refreshing my scarce knowledge of Apache’s mod-rewrite, I read through the mod_rewrite guide, and found an extremely interesting section, titled

On-the-fly Content-Regeneration

Here’s the theoretical problem:

1. we are building a high-traffic site with lots of once-per-(hour|day) updated items
2. we have a CMS with just all the features we need, but it’s really CPU/DB-consuming and slow (does it sound familiar? )
3. there’s a need to serve static files

And here’s the ‘radical alternative’ solution:

1. install the CMS of choice
2. tweak the CMS’s output layer to both produce/write to disk (or update) static HTML files, and to dump those same pages directly to browser
3. use the “On-the-fly Content-Regeneration” mod_rewrite rules set

This is it, in short. The “On-the-fly Content-Regeneration” will read the static files if they exist, or will query the CMS, which will create/update the static files and output the necessary page. You can also setup a cron-job to remove all static files older than XX minutes, to force content refresh.

Below is the copy of “On-the-fly Content-Regeneration” from the mod_rewrite guide.
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Recently I learned about Zope, which is an “open source web application server”, primarily written in Python.

Then Django and Turbogears were seen as web-development frameworks akin to Zope. Search revealed an interesting anti-Zope rant at Zope vs Django. Reading until the end, and then following the comments, I came across the comment by Holger Froebe, which is a huge one (probably the longest comment I had ever seen), and represents a detailed explanation with examples of the reasons to use Zope 3. I found that comment to be a really good-written one, so if you are deciding on whether you should use Zope 3 or not, then read the comment here (scroll down or just search for “Holger Froebe”).

For convenience and in order to preserve this worhty piece of work from vanishing, below is the 99%-exact copy-paste of that comment.
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This is a collection of links related to the multiple-language content in Drupal CMS.

i18n module
i18n: Getting the whole thing to work : http://drupal.org/node/81094
Patch: Translations of menu titles and descriptions: http://drupal.org/node/70919
Translated links: http://drupal.org/node/67814
i18n: menu not expanding with URL-Alias: http://drupal.org/node/80820

There was an alternative module to i18n, but I cannot find it at the moment.