Yesteray I went off on an experiment with one of our own Drupal sites.  For some years now I've maintaned the web site http://www.uppitywis.org - it's a political blog about progressive politics in Wisconsin.  It's gone thorugh a lot of different configurations and life stages. At the moment it's built on a pretty straightforward build of Panopoly,.  In the most recent version I have taken it out of Varnish, and it runs behind Cloudflare.

In an attempt to eat our own Dogfood as a Cloudlflare host, I though I'd make a stab at making Cloudflare cache the entire site, rather than just the static assets. You can do this in the free Cloudflare implementation by setting up a rule that says "cache everything" and putting it in with your three allowed rules. I've also set up rules to not cache admin* and user* and have put those ahead of the cache everything rule - so that admin functions are not cached.

Update -

The latest requirements for Drupal 8 include a requirement for MySQL/MariaDB/PerconaDB of version 5.5.3 or later - now THAT one may be an issue for  a lot of hosting companies.  We're going to get that done, but it's a little more unusual than the PHP requirement.  At the moment our solution to this is to be using CentOS 7 for all of our database servers (and since CentOS 7 uses MariaDB 5.5, that works fine). We're currently re-thinking what we're actually going to do about this before the Drupal 8 release.

I'm writing a little bit today about some of the concerns that folks are having about Drupal 8, the new hosting requirements it imposes, and particularly the concerns that smaller organizations will not be able to find Drupal 8 compatible hosting plans. There is a lot going on with us and with other hosting companies at the moment to support Drupal 8 and other PHP software that has more modern requirements. We don't think this will be an issue with most reliable hosting companies by the time Drupal 8 ships.

Almost everyone who does any form of Drupal development uses Drush - it's the Swiss Army Knife of the Drupal world. Drush is the Drupal Shell, and it lets you do a whole lot of amazing things with Drupal sites without actually going to the site, logging in, and clicking buttons.  It's a command-line tool (and since I'm an old UNIX hand, it's just right for me.

Despite the fact that we all use Drush, it's pretty clear that some of us use it better than others. I'm often really impressed with seeing someone else use it effectively, with powerful aliases, and doing workflow things with drush that I could hardly imagine. And let's face it, we can't always have a mentor at hand.

This book, Drush for Developers Second Edition,  can be your mentor. It's a pretty quick read (a little over 150 pages) as technical books go. It covers a lot of territory along the way, though.  As all these books seem to do, it starts out with installing Drush on your server, and then moves forward into using it.  Though I've been using Drush for some time now, I never have quite been able to grasp the more advanced uses, like using Drush to move code and features from development to test to production, for example.  This book give a really good idea of how to do some of those functions.