howto

Problem: I want to be able to restrict access to nodes on a per-user basis (NOT per role).

There are currently many solutions for restricting access based on user roles, but what if you have a group of users who share the same role (say Authenticated User) but want to restrict their access to nodes on a per user basis?

I began the Devbee website back in March as a way to help others by way of documenting what I have learned about Drupal and also to drum up a little bit of business for myself. The content of this site is extremely targeted, and I don't ever expect to see more than a few hundred visits a day. This definitely does not reflect the expectations, or at least hopes, of most website owners. It's typically all about bringing in as many visitors as possible to generate money through advertising or purchases. Sites interested in bringing in large numbers of visitors typically do this by spending a lot of time focusing on "search engine optimization" (SEO). Absolutely nothing can drive traffic to a site like a top placement in the search results on one of the major search engines.

Back in the day (way back during the last millennium), all one needed to do was have a simple HTML page containing relevant words or phrases and he was fairly likely to make a decent showing in results pages. In fact, this is exactly how I shifted from studying literature to building websites. I built my first homepage (don't laugh!) for fun. It was found by an employer, and I got a cool job at a major search engine. Today, it is not so simple.

Fortunately for us, as Drupal users, we have a secret weapon, Drupal itself. Drupal SEO does not require any witchcraft or elaborate HTML trickery. It's simple, and in this article, I'm going to explain how I get consistent premium search placement with very little effort.

PHP is an interpreted language. This means that each time a PHP generated page is requested, the server must read in the various files needed and "compile" them into something the machine can understand (opcode). A typical Drupal page requires more than a dozen of these bits of code be compiled.

Opcode cache mechanisms preserve this generated code in cache so that it need only be generated a single time to server hundreds or millions of subsequent requests.

Enabling opcode cache will reduce the time it takes to generate a page by up to 90%.

PHP is known for its blazing speed. Why would you want to speed up your PHP applications even more? Well, first and foremost is the coolness factor. Next, you'll increase the capacity of your current server(s) many times over, thereby postponing the inevitable need to add new hardware as your site's popularity explodes. Lastly, high bandwidth, low latency visitors to your site who are currently seeing page load times in the 1-2 second range will be shocked to find your vamped up site serving up pages almost instantaneously. After enabling opcode cache on my own server, I saw page loads drop from about 1.5 seconds to as low as 300ms. Now that's good fun the whole family can enjoy.