Using the Boost module
We're going to turn our attention to the Boost module in this section. Boost is a contributed module that allows you to run incredibly advanced static page caching on your Drupal site. This caching mechanism will help to increase performance and scalability on your site, especially if it gets heavy traffic and anonymous page visits, and it is on a shared hosting environment. This is usually the first contributed performance-based module to turn to for help when you host your Drupal site on a shared server. Developers running Drupal sites on shared servers and running sites that serve predominantly anonymous Drupal users will definitely want to try out this module. It's also a fun module to use from a technical standpoint because you can see the results immediately, as you configure it.
The Drupal project page for the module is here: http://drupal.org/project/ boost. There is a wealth of detailed information about the module on this project page, including announcements about upcoming conference presentations that focus on the Boost module, testimonials, install instructions, and links to documentation and associated modules that you may want to run alongside Boost. It is very popular and has quite a following in the Drupal development community. I definitely recommend reading about this module and all of its install and configuration instructions in detail before attempting to use it.
The install paragraph suggests reading through the module README.txt file before running the install for details on how the module works. There are also detailed instructions and documentation on the module here: http://drupal.org/ node/545664.
Note that the one requirement to use this module is that your Drupal site must have clean URLs configured and enabled. It's a good idea to make sure you are running clean URLs on your site before you start installing and configuring Boost.
Additionally, there are some recommended modules that the developers encourage you to install in tandem with the Boost module. We will install two of these modules: Global Redirect and Transliteration. The Global Redirect module runs a number of checks on your website including the following:
• Checks the current URL for a Drupal path alias and does a 301 redirect to the URL if it is not being used.
• Checks the current URL for a trailing / and removes the slash if it's present in Drupal URLs.
• Checks if the current URL is the same as the site's front page and redirects to the front page if it locates a match.
• Checks to see if you are using clean URLs. If you do have clean URLs enabled, this module ensures URLs are accessed using the clean URL method rather than an unclean method (for example, ?q=user).
• Checks access to the URL. If a user does not have permissions to view the URL, then no redirects are allowed. This helps to protect private URL aliases.
• Checks to ensure the alias matches the URL it is aliasing. So, if you have a URL alias such as /about and this directs to node/2 3, then a user on your site can access the page using either of those URLs.
• The Transliteration module removes white space and non-ASCII characters in your URLs. For example, it will try and add underscores to fill white space in a URL.
Installing and enabling these two modules will help remove glitches and errors in your site's path structure.
If you haven't already, we'll also take the time now to install the Poormanscron module and set up and configure automatic cron runs instead of having to continue running cron manually. We'll return to installing and configuring Poormanscron later in this chapter, but just keep it on your radar for now.
Let's go ahead and install the Boost module and take a closer look at some of its features.
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