For the geeks: what runs pray4tori.com?

I am being asked quite frequently what is running Tori's website. As a minimum tribute to all open source developers who made this possible I decided I would write a short Blog entry about it. Here it is:

• First, the site would not have been possible without the amazing creativity of Dries Buytaert. Project Drupal at http://www.drupal.org/ is used as the core web framework for the site.

Drupal being a very flexible platform we have added a bunch of modules to make it do what we wanted. Very little tweaking was actually required. Someone else already had done most of what we were trying to accomplish and we were able to benificit from their hard work.

Here are some of the most significant modules used:

• "blog": It allows Tim to post the daily updates and others to create content on the site as well.
• "comment": This is how most of you add content to the site. These comments prove to be fantastic and it could not be done without this module.
• "image": All those cool pictures of Tori would not be on this site if it wasn't for the image module. It has a simple interface allowing any registered user to upload an image to the site easily.
• "nodevote": Cool little module allowing users to vote on 'content'. We are using it to rate images. This is what was used to do the 'Pray4Tori contest'. Whitney and Guy still need to sit down to write up the results.
• "statistics": This module helps Tim and I keep track of site and you guys :-).
• "PHPTemplate" and "bluemarine": These are the Drupal extensions allowing pray4tori.com to look the way it does. The 3 columns layout was chosen to allow the extensive amount of content to be displayed easily on the front page.

While there are other modules in use, these compose the main platform for pray4tori.com. It's proven to be very reliable so far (**knock on wood**) which is a good thing since we don't backup enough. I rsync the file system to a backup machine everyday but I haven't found the time to automate the SQL database backup yet. It would only take probably 1 or 2 hours to figure out and do... That's 1 or 2 hours I haven't found yet :-(.

It is fair to say that the site has been in autopilot pretty since it was brought up. I would like to once again acknowledge Rob Perry for his role as art director and designer for pray4tori.com.

• Gallery | Your photos on your website. This is probably what I consider one of the most formidable pieces of web software that was ever put together. The project, 'Gallery' can be found at http://gallery.menalto.com/. Whenever you get redirected to a photo gallery for a lot of pictures: Gallery is behind it. I have been using it for many years and will continue to do so.

The site is hosted by the largest web hosting company for a very reasonnable monthly cost (my little contribution to Tori).
It's using:
- About 400MB of disk space (out of 30,000 MB).
- That's about 3,250 files (out of 260,000 allowed).
- Almost 15MB of SQL space - that is quite a bit (out of 100 MB).
- About 2 cups of coffee a day by Tim (in the morning).
- About 10Gb of bandwidth per month.

That's pretty much all I can think of right now (that's probably the finer air of Park City). I might update this list later but for now, that is it.

Thank you very much to all the developers who have contributed to the various projects used here: Linux Kernel, GNU tools, Apache web Server, MySQL database server, PHP language, Gallery, Drupal, Drupal modules, ImageMagick and many many more I forgot to mention.

Take care,
-Guy