boost

I'm a huge fan of Boost for Drupal; the module generates static HTML pages for nodes and other pages on your Drupal site so Apache can serve anonymous visitors the static pages without touching PHP or Drupal, thus allowing a normal web server (especially on cheaper shared hosting) to serve thousands instead of tens of visitors per second (or worse!).

For Drupal 7, though, Boost was rewritten and substantially simplified. This was great in that it made Boost more stable, faster, and easier to configure, but it also meant that the integrated cache expiration functionality was dumbed down and didn't really exist at all for a long time. I wrote the Boost Expire module to make it easy for sites using Boost to have the static HTML cache cleared when someone created, updated, or deleted a node or comment, among other things.

On the St. Louis Review website (case study here), which offers much of its content based on a subscription model (you must be a subscriber to access the 'premium' content), we wanted to allow those inside our network access to nodes that were marked 'subscribers-only', without having to log in to the website and maintain a user account. Here's how we did it:

1 - Modification of Custom Subscriber Access Code

Our site uses hook_nodeapi() to limit access to 'premium' or 'subscribers-only' content. We simply added in a check to see if users were coming from a certain IP address (the IP address for our corporate network):

To the uninitiated, Boost is a module for Drupal which has the potential to make your Drupal-based website run many times faster than it's currently running. Boost basically converts pages on a Drupal site into static html files, and allows your website to direct anonymous (non-logged-in) users to the cached html pages.

Doing so speeds your site up quite a bit, because instead of your web server having to run some PHP scripts and connect to your website's database, the server can simply send the complete html file, which requires no extra processor cycles or memory to compile. If your website has a lot of anonymous traffic, the potential speedup is very large. Instead of serving hundreds of users per minute, you could serve thousands.