We recently re-launched Needlenose our progressive-leaning political weblog based on the Drupal engine. It's a collaborative blog with three main writers and guest contributors. The reviews have been pretty good so far. Based on user feedback, some favorite features are the threaded comments and the 'recent posts' feature.

The old weblog was based on pMachine and it lacked a lot of features we were looking for. It also had some database bugs that once got us kicked off a hosting site when we got too many hits and locked-up their server :-( We didn't even try to migrate the content over from pMachine to the new site (just archived it on the site under 'Classic Needlenose').

We did a lot of searching and finally settled on Drupal. Some tech-notes: it's based on the 4.4.2 engine. Custom theme with some third-party modules enabled (weblinks, news aggregator, etc). We tried to keep the core code untouched since we knew we'd be upgrading to the new engine. We haven't enabled the forums, even though we'd like to, because it doesn't support 'read-only' announcement areas (hopefully in 4.5.0?) The theme is a three-column design, but for now we've only enabled two columns. The third-column will be turned on once we start rolling out plug-in 'block-apps' -- little mini-apps that run inside blocks -- that we've been working on. Drupal's performance has been pretty good so far. It even went through a little spike where we got over 2000 article views in an hour when we got a link from a big news site (on our second day on Drupal, no less!)

Kudos to the Drupal development team. It's a great platform and it looks like it's getting better and better with each rev.

Comments

jsbthree’s picture

The theme and layout are excellent. Is it a stock theme?? Is code available?? Very impressed.

fubar’s picture

Thanks. Glad you liked it. It's not a stock theme (but I started with one of the vanilla ones included with the 4.4 package so I could learn more about the theme engine). The site is getting between 20-40,000 visitors a month now (maxed out at 5000+ in a single day) and Drupal works like a champ. We're planning on adding GoogleSense and BlogAds to it by next week, so maybe I'll soon have some tips for people wanting to integrate advertising into their Drupal sites.

Now that 4.5 is coming out, I'm going to first try to make sure the theme continues to work with that, then I'll see about posting a generic version of the theme here.

hankhill’s picture

The copyright symbol is ©

kufr’s picture

I like the colors, the red and blue. There is only 1 thing I'd suggest: Try making your font a dark grey, people will think it is black, but it'll be more pleasing to the eye.

About the forum, on my site, I went ahead and kept my phpBB forum, because it has a lot more features and it is the format most people are accustomed to. You may want to consider using an altogether different forum software, aside from Drupal.

Also, that font is a little hard to read. You might want to try Arial or Verdana. I think this site uses those.

Very nice, and creative use of colors, I like that. :)

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johnk’s picture

It's nice and busy :-)