The Examiner.com Launched on Drupal 7
Earlier today Drupal Radar broke the news that the Examiner.com has launched on Drupal 7. That started a tsunami of tweets among Drupalers. Its still going on and will for some time.
This is an endorsement for Drupal 7 of monumental proportions. That Drupal is popular in the online media world is old news, but that a website of the Examiners size is jumping on the Drupal 7 train this early is "stop the presses" news.
With over 42,000 content contributors, Examiner.com has enjoyed some of the fastest year-over-year growth of any online media company.
The above quote comes from a case study, see link below, about this migration project made by Acquia. With so many contributors it requires a platform that is able to scale, and scale big.
MongoDB
The usual suspect, MySQL, simply wouldn't be able to cope with it without a massive cluster. The developers therefor turned to MongoDB and are utilising a hybrid using both MySQL and MongoDB to be able to cope with the traffic.
MongoDB is a so called NoSQL database designed to scale much better than a traditional SQL database. One of the goals with the total rewrite of Drupals database layer, including using PDO, was to open up for other databases than MySQL and PostgreSQL. MicroSoft quickly jumped onboard and have been working with the Drupal community to make sure their MSSQL can be used as the database backend for Drupal. Other databases are also already available.
Drupal 7 Jump Started
Here I though I was "brave" running my little blog on Drupal 7. My bravery is very pale in comparison to this news. These guys simply must have balls of steel for pulling this off. After all, Drupal 7 isn't even in beta yet. API's can still change and cause problems when they need to update the site when new releases are available.
They have obviously calculated with that and come to the conclusion that it is worth to take that risk. It also shows that Dries Buytaerts vision and the hard work by the community already is paying off.
If you haven't realised it yet, this news surely is evidence enough that Drupal 7 not only going to be the best release so far, but also going to change the way we build websites and be a very tough player for the competitors on the ever growing web CMS market.
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Comments
Anonymous (not verified)
Fri, 08/20/2010 - 14:35
Re: The Examiner.com Launched on Drupal 7
You techno geeks may be impressed by this "gutsy" move, but have you actually looked at the new Examiner.com? It doesn't work. It has more bugs than a hive and the writers' hard work has been ruined. The people who work for the site are furious. Examiner launched this monstrosity of an "upgrade" knowing there were problems and they didn't care. Now everyone else is paying for it.
thomas
Fri, 08/20/2010 - 18:24
Re: The Examiner.com Launched on Drupal 7
Hi,
I have taken a quick look at it and didn't experience any problems. I don't know how it looked before since I never visited it until the relaunch on Drupal.
I'm not surprised there are problems, and that some people don't like the changes. Its just normal when things are changed.
Launching it on Drupal 7 was a big risk, especially considering it is not even in beta yet. Hopefully they will be able to sort out the problems they have soon. Then when users and visitors starts to get used to the new features the storm will calm down.
/thomas
K. (not verified)
Sun, 08/22/2010 - 16:13
Re: The Examiner.com Launched on Drupal 7
I'm sure what you see did look fine. But what you DON'T see are the thousands of articles that went *poof* into the air and are nowhere to be found.
You don't see that some of the articles written by particular contributors migrated to different writer's pages!
You don't see that once an article is edited, its URL changes and renders any links to it broken.
You don't see that unpublished material, such as notes or half-finished articles all went live!
You don't see anything whatsoever from the many writers whose entire pages are gone.
And you don't see that views --and income-- are down 75%.
This isn't a simple matter of people being unhappy with changes. This is an unmitigated disaster.
thomas
Sun, 08/22/2010 - 17:40
Re: The Examiner.com Launched on Drupal 7
Hi K,
Since I don't have access to the backend system, nor am a writer at the Examiner, the only conclusions I could draw (at the time I published this post and the comment you replied to) is that it seemed to work.
Since then I have received a lot of detailed information from Examiner writers about the many serious problems it has. This information has lead me to publish two more posts about these problems:
I have also contacted Examiner.com with a request for comments on it.
/thomas
Anonymous (not verified)
Sun, 08/22/2010 - 16:06
Re: The Examiner.com Launched on Drupal 7
Site views on Examiner are down a whopping 75%!
Links to archived content are broken and the pages have been dropped from Google searches, and that's just one of a huge list of flaws. Writers are leaving in droves as those who used to make a decent wage are now making pennies.
Willi Gutmann (not verified)
Thu, 10/14/2010 - 06:35
Re: The Examiner.com Launched on Drupal 7
Examiner down to 16,500 “active writers” in USA and Canada
http://bit.ly/NewsWreck
UPDATE (10/12/10): Examiner.com CEO Rick Blair responded :
We actually have had more than 62,000 total Examiners contribute on our site since we launched in 2008; we still actively communicate with more than 55,000, which is what that number is based on. Currently we have an average of about 60 percent that have actively contributed in the past 90 days. We use that time frame in monitoring engagement to take into account our daily publishing frequency is always fluctuating – as some titles like sports are seasonal, others like music are dependent upon new information or movement, for example.
””“Our 30-day average reflects this oscillation, as we range between 30 to 40 percent active in that time frame. ”“”“
30% of 55,000 = 16, 500 and that comes from the CEO of Examiner