So I’ve installed the current beta (for non-production environments) of Drupal 7 on an nginx/php/mysql setup to test speed, interface and ease of use. It was a double-whammy operation, on the one hand testing the server environment, and on the other, the new software. It’s not production-ready, so I don’t expect it to be ready by any stretch of the imagination. So these are just impressions.From an interface perspective, many of the elements that have made WordPress a popular blogging-, even site-option, can be recognised here, and the basic on-page selection metaphor has been moved into a navigation ‘ribbon’ with ‘Dashboard’ (in a grey top bar, similar to WordPress’s rendition on /wp-admin/), with postings beneath this. A whole lot of the additional modules have been rolled in from the go so there’s no need to add additional modules to get a simple site up and live very quickly. As I go into the themeing of Drupal 7, I’ll post updates here.

Check back for a detailed set of impressions over time.

On another note, I’m loving nginx’s lightweight footprint, speed and volume-handling capacity – running on 0.7.63 only tweaked to do selective gzipping of content.

Headers as below:

Server: nginx/0.7.63
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:32:41 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.11
Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:32:40 +0000
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Etag: "1258284760"
X-Generator: Drupal 7 (http://drupal.org)
Content-Encoding: gzip

In a Windows Environment, you’ll want to link to the php-cgi.exe:

location ~ \.php$ {
root           html;
fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index  index.php;
fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  f:/nginx/html/$fastcgi_script_name;
include        fastcgi_params;
}

and you may want to set some gzip compression for nginx:

 keepalive_timeout   65;

 gzip                on;
 gzip_http_version   1.1;
 gzip_vary           on;
 gzip_comp_level     6;
 gzip_buffers        16 8k;
 gzip_proxied        any;
 gzip_min_length     1000;
 gzip_types          text/plain text/html text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;