I am putting together the top 10 Drupal Websites list. Why? There seem to have been a whole bunch of really nice sites launched in the last 6-12 months so this is the opportunity for people to vote for, or add their favourite. We get to all see Drupal websites we may not have seen. And we get to give some link love.

Add your favourite(s) below in the Comments.

I still like the development seed sites

http://developmentseed.org/
http://openatrium.com/

Simple design - effective usability and nice content placement. They don't look Drupal.

The Whitehouse Drupal site is also quote nice.

Add your favourite Drupal sites and lets get compiling a Top 10.

Just spent some time watching a video at Nettuts (http://net.tutsplus.com/videos/screencasts/a-detailed-look-at-the-960-cs...) demonstrating the 960gs (http://960.gs) system for rapid CSS development. It is a small framework that offers really quick layout options. The question is, is it worth it for Drupal?

There is a 960gs Drupal theme available (http://drupal.org/project/ninesixty) but personally I think I will stick to Zen for now as I know it so well. It seems a really well developed project though so have a look.

If you are creating CSS layouts from scratch then I definitely recommend looking at the 960gs system.

The sketch sheets and templates really help speed things up and can help all those invested in the site (designers, developers, managers) with understanding how the layout works.

I love it when sites like fastcompany and The Economist make business decisions to switch their websites to Drupal, it just warms the ends of my cold wet Vancouver toes. But more than those I love it when the US Government makes decisions to make the www.whitehouse.gov website a Drupal site.

Thumbs up.

From the title you may think I might have made some drastic changes like giving up coffee or exercising but sadly this far too geeky a post for that.

This week I got the Drupal Boost module working. That with the Drupal simpleCDN module means I now have a much faster site (not this one). Boost allows you to serve static pages to anonymous users rather than Drupal loading them all (including views).

Upgraded to Open Atrium (beta2) which is making life much easier for me in relation project management / collaboration and knowledge management. Especially work on jagajum

Got Drupal bubbletimer going (mostly) to allow people to track the time they spend on tasks and similar. Cool module for time tracking/timesheets in Drupal.

In the last week I have had a large % of site crashes on one of my most popular sites. Usually able to cope with 5K+ daily unique visits the site was falling over for no apparent reason. It wasn't until I checked my Drupal Mollom logs that I found out why it might be that my server was under a little extra strain. And it seems it has not just been the last few days but weeks that this has been a problem which is why my last host was happy to see the back of me.

The below graph indicates spam that was filtered and handled by the Mollom module installed on my Drupal installation. The orange is bad, the green is good. All I can say is thank you Mollom (and Dries) for such a great spam protection module. I can sleep better at night...now how to stop the spam coming so my site doesn't freak out at stopping it. I am guessing Mollom has to work hard to filter such high volumes of spam and junk which still strains the server.

I should add Mollom works across other platforms including Wordpress, Joomla!, Radiant, SilverStripe.

Drupal can be a server heavy CMS. So there are alot of things you need to optimise to make it run as smoothly and as fast as possible. Load times can be a real traffic killer but there is hope. I have experienced a whole lot of techniques to optimise your Drupal website but this post is all about one  module called SimpleCDN. It is called SimpleCDN, I am guessing, as it was first made to work with the SimpleCDN network.

I just don't understand why when I need things to work they break. Expletives don't describe today well enough.

The checklist of moving a website from one server to another should be copy database, copy files -> upload files, upload database, move NS, check email accounts and your done.

It seems to be the season of silly things for me. Today I did a bulk node import from an old blog into this blog. But what I failed to do was turn off the Twitter update status option in the twitter module for Drupal. So, be warned. Unless you want to repeat my stupidity remember to turn off the Drupal twitter Module update option when bulk importing nodes.

To those who received all 192 gratuitous updates in twitter, my humble, humble apologies.

Finally, after a lot of thought markparrott.com has received it's long awaited upgrade to Drupal 6.10. I figure it's time to build some more interesting thoughts into the site so the theme face lift will be next and then some insights into the SEO work I have been doing lately.

I experimented with quite a few off-line blogging tools before I decided that ecto was a good choice. When you select a tool like this It is hard to know if the maintainer will continue to upgrade and improve it. I have been using ecto about six months and think I have had a least two updates during this time which is good.

To use any off-line blogging tool with Drupal you need to enable the Blog API. This can be found on the modules page, in the Core-optional section. If you're using ecto and it is the latest version then Drupal it's available in the list when you click in new account. In actual fact the software uses the settings for the movable type blog which must use the same blogger API, so worst-case select movable type as your blog type.