Early dooce® v6 Nerd FAQ
November 19th, 2007This will be a quick post, as we’re still watching the server and making sure things are working. Bear with us while we make the transition. I hope to answer some questions about the new dooce® redesign that we’re getting from readers from the geek side of things.
Why Drupal?
The site needed a robust framework that could handle a diverse and changing set of criteria. We could have gone any number of ways, but making the switch from a primarily static page site to a dynamic one steered us quickly towards Drupal. It’s open source and has the flexibility we were looking for. There are a lot of great platforms out there, but I had been watching a handful up close, including Drupal, for several years. It seems that in the last couple of years, Drupal has had a ton of work done on it, to it and with it. The development community around it solves similar problems to those we have in terms of server nerdery with dooce.com. Again, any number of solutions would have worked, Drupal seemed the best fit after a few years of watching different systems morph, rise and fall.
Did you have help?
Oh yes we did. Heather did the design comps, I did the first rounds of CSS and slicing and added a couple of small touches that Heather art directed and we hired some awesome developers. We needed help with theming in Drupal (it’s notorious for being cranky) and after seeing Merlin Mann launch 43folders on Drupal, we used a couple of the same folks because we were tackling similar issues; database migration, theming and caching. I can’t speak highly enough of the 43folders redesign and how inspirational it was in the decision to migrate platforms.
On the theming front, we hired RoopleTheme who steered us through some challenges (new content types and templates for Daily Chuck, Daily Photo and Daily Style) as well as did the backbreaking work of taking my HTML/CSS work and getting it to function inside of Drupal. Bill from Roople also had some tricks up his sleeve with using Drupal’s blocks and modules. Really tasty. The second need was to migrate our Movable Type MySQL database into something Drupal could use as well as set up a testing server and move stuff from there to the live site. We also needed some help with caching and some custom module work for functionality and found a great help in Ben Durbin, who made last night’s launch the easiest ever. There’s no way Heather and I could have pulled this off without these guys. Ben is one of those maddeningly awesome people who can answer obtuse questions from weird people with ease. I am not sure I possess either the technical knowledge or the verbal prowess to describe the tech mastery he pulled off, but if I was really rich I’d pay him loads of money to make stuff every day. Hire both of these people immediately.
Have you noticed huge issues moving from static pages to dynamic?
Drupal’s caching mechanisms as well as server setup have yielded a slightly bigger bump in server usage, but nothing like I thought we’d see. Opening comments will be the real test.
Where’s the feed?
Working on it. Will likely be live tonight. You can re-subscribe if you want, but we’ll be doing a redirect later that should keep your subscription intact. Just be patient.
Where are the Next/Previous links?
Coming. Heather and I had to have a talk about how people use them. There was discussion about moving through categories versus moving through content. Given the work that was done to aggregate all of the old content and blog settings, we were unclear about how they should function. Your emails have helped us decide the direction to go. I’d love to have them live tonight, but not sure if it’s something we can get to given some other issues that need addressing. Hold tight for them, they are coming.
You should have used [insert favorite CMS]
Perhaps. Perhaps. So far, so good. Very happy with our choice and wish no other vendors anything but success. Keep on making great software. People are always looking for better, easier and faster. The Onion uses Drupal as does Avril Lavigne. What really matters is making Heather’s awesome content easier to read and easier to find and read.
I am now going to explode. o
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November 19th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Oh, you did NOT just go to Avril Lavigne as a reason to use drupal.
Yeah, that’s a paddling.
November 19th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
I don’t know WHAT the hell you are talking about (Drupal?), but it looks really nice.
November 19th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
As long as Avril’s song “Complicated” wasn’t about her trying to set up Drupal, you should be all right.
Congratulations on the relaunch!
November 19th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Most of this post was WAY over my head (which holds my teeny-tiny brain).
I do have a question though-
Are you not selling T-shirts anymore?
November 19th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
Avril? Lavigne? Total doocebag.
You guys have done a great job on the new site. Lovin’ it.
Jules
House of Jules
November 19th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Wow–my head just exploded. Fantastic!
November 19th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
I was a bit surprised when I took a quick peek at the code and saw you were using Drupal. It wouldn’t have been my guess for your switch, but I’m glad it’s working out well. Super sexy from this end.
November 19th, 2007 at 9:53 pm
I really like the new site and “feel” that you guys are trying to accomplish. As with any new design, there is always some sort of “punch-list.” I just have one quick question:
Since the new daily photos are larger, are you guys worried about someone “Right-Click-Save-As” and stealing your photos? I know that everything on Dooce.com has some sort of copyright, but I was just wondering how you keep copyright infringement to a minimum.
November 19th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
I love Avril. So glad you’re using the same CMS as her.
November 19th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
I have come to love Drupal after wanting to kill myself over it.
November 19th, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Be warned: Drupal is incredibly poor at handling a large number of modules. Your PHP memory usage will go through the roof if you enable too many. Also avoid CCK and Views at all costs if you value efficiency in your database interactions.
Drupal caching is really only useful for non-logged in users. Commenting will present some problems, especially if you’ve made any of the above mistakes.
Keep us posted.
November 19th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
@Jay, I’ve been watching the server pretty much constantly since Heather turned on comments here. So far, so good. I can’t entirely blame Movable Type’s comment performance based on the old dooce design, because I had added a bunch of logic. I do think there may have been some architectural issues, but those may have been negated by subsequent Movable Type versions. We stayed at 3.2.
Given the traffic surge today with the addition of comments, I’d give Drupal outstanding marks. But I’d chalk that up to what Bill and Ben did behind the scenes.
November 20th, 2007 at 1:58 am
Bill and Ben the flowerpot men!
Seriously, reading this post, was a whole lot of jargon I didn’t understand, but you know what, the passion that goes behind it speaks for itself. Good stuff!
November 20th, 2007 at 3:48 am
The site looks great! I was very surprised that you went with Drupal. I had a hell of a time with it but that was a while ago and I didn’t have much help. Good job.
November 20th, 2007 at 4:26 am
Just to let you know the RSS is still working fine (on Google Reader), I haven’t needed to resubscribe. Only thing is it has re-supplied a couple of posts as unread. No probs.
November 20th, 2007 at 6:25 am
Well done indeed! I’ve been looking at Drupal for a while and just installed it last week on a test server to see if it will be better than the home baked CMS that a buddy and I cooked up years ago for clients.
So far the extensibility and developer community are what have me sold on it. Rumours on the Drupal boards are that Digg was built off of a Drupal framework.
Congrats on the relaunch, now get some rest, I’m sure you’re exhausted.
November 20th, 2007 at 7:35 am
Huh?
November 20th, 2007 at 8:38 am
the site is awesome. Very impressed!
November 20th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Ahoy. Tasty theme work there.
Unpleasantness *can* sometimes happen when you throw a ton of traffic at Drupal and have comments enabled. (MyISAM is the default MySQL storage engine. It would very much not be suitable for you under commenting load.)
If you find yourself hitting a wall, and MySQL storage engines or RAM caches or non-Apache web servers aren’t things you’re comfortable with, and you don’t already have that covered… feel free to mail me.
The simultaneously-good-and-bad news would be that if you’re going to run into problems, it’ll either not happen for several months, or it’ll happen almost immediately. Nothing in between.
Again, congrats. Nice work all round, this one.
November 20th, 2007 at 9:05 am
Negative, schmegative… The internet’s like an asshole, everyone’s got one… Wait, that’s not how that saying goes. Anywho, people who say “you should’ve done X” or “X sucks” probably don’t have an ounce of a clue what it took for you guys to get the new Dooce rolling seamlessly. These same people probably would’ve been screaming their inter-heads off if Dooce had experience any significant downtime.
And anyway, try to find solace in the fact that the people who really DO like the redesign are less likely to speak up (http://www.stuntbox.com/blog/2007/10/i-hate-you-i-love-you/) So just take all those positive comments above and multiply times a gagillion.
November 20th, 2007 at 9:13 am
Jon, Great job! I told Heather she owes you a massage. Go collect.
November 20th, 2007 at 9:47 am
@Jay;
CCK and Views are considered “Must Haves” by many in the Drupal community, and I’ve seen them on several “must have modules” lists, with some going as far as calling them “Holy Grails”.
10 Drupal Modules You Can’t Live Without
Top 10 Drupal Modules
10 Drupal Modules You Can’t Live Without
What are these folks missing?
November 20th, 2007 at 10:07 am
I don’t know anything about Drupal or all that other stuff you wrote, so this won’t be a particularly technical review of the new site, but I have to say….nice!
I saw it at work on my desktop first and it doesn’t fit in my whole screen, I had to scroll side to side to get the whole thing. I was kind of bummed about that (again, I’m not that savvy, so maybe there’s something I can do to fix that myself) but then I got home and checked it out on my macbook and daaaaaamn, it’s so nice when it all fits on the screen!! I love it.
November 20th, 2007 at 10:12 am
You did a great job. I can only imagine how much work that must have been. I found Drupal hard to control initially, but it really is a powerful system. The themes are really more flexible than they appear once you get the hang of it and with the right developers, you can do just about anything to it. Kudos to you all!
November 20th, 2007 at 10:40 am
The redesign looks great.. drupal definitely shines here.
One question, were you planning on letting the RSS feeds pull the entire post? Don’t get me wrong, I love not having to open up a browser, but for the traffic numbers, you might want to go back to only sending out a snippet in the feed.