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By Appnovation on
Sharon Waxman, a former Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times, has a new Hollywood News site called TheWrap.com.
Like most news sites, TheWrap.com has article, column and blog areas. Part of the site's focus is in unifying community features with extensive site content. All site content must be categorized and easily maintainable. Publishing control is a critical feature for the newsroom team. As a result, the feature set for the site includes a ranking system for controlling the position of the articles in the listing areas. The site includes a number of community features, including user profiles, private messaging and user groups.
Why Drupal was chosen:
In 2008, Sharon and her team reviewed various content management platforms for the news site and after considering the various available options, decided to use Drupal as their content management platform. In July 2008, Appnovation Technologies was chosen to develop the site. The site development went through various iterations of development cycle, and the site was completed in December 2008.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Handling Traffic Spikes
While extensive caching had already been implemented on TheWrap.com, including the use of APC, basic Drupal caching and Results Cache for various content listings such as the columns page, Varnish was enabled on these two days to handle the traffic spike.
Custom Caching
The "Most Popular" box is a key feature of the site. Without caching, the queries used for this feature are quite slow even after optimization. As a solution, the site uses an automated Cron job to create an XML file that stores the results of the queries. The "Most Popular" content is then displayed using the XML information, reducing database usage.
Publishing Workflow
As a publishing site with multiple writers and editors, TheWrap.com needed a full-featured publishing control system that allows new articles, blog posts, column posts to be created and edited in a streamlined process. The key feature of the work flow is the ability to track multiple versions of new content, allowing the company to publish content without having to move it between different media.
Using WorkFlow and the Revision Moderation modules, a system with five roles has been created. The roles include super user, writer, editor, blogger and columnist. Bloggers and columnists may only edit their own blog or column. Writers may only create, but not publish, content. Editors and super users may publish content. There is also a system that allows editors to locate all new articles to be published.
The site was launched on January 19th, 2009. In February 2009, the site had over 130,000 visits and 650,000 page views. In just one month, it grew to over 240,000 unique visits and over 900,000 page views.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
CCK and Views are used to manage and display the content types. There are 9 main content types for the site including Pages, Columns, Column Posts, Blogs, Blog Posts, Articles, Slideshows, Headline and Profile. Most of these are simple content types. Most content areas are provided by custom views, with the exception of some front-page display blocks where the editorial staff need complete control. Custom modules display information in these block areas.
FCK is used as the WYSIWYG editor, as we have found it to be more user friendly and reliable than TinyMCE.
To improve the user-friendliness of the site, the Live Search module provides instant search results.
The ThickBox module displays the slide shows, allowing visitors to view the slide shows without leaving the main page. Social links have been added to most content pages using the ShareThismodule. And, as a news site, providing printer friendly pages is a critical function.
For SEO purposes, meta tags are configured using the Meta Tags module and the Path Automodule is used to provide more structured URLs. The Site map module has also been installed on the site.
Five Star and Vote up/down provide the article voting, and users may add friends to their user profiles via the Buddy list module.
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Project team:
BaseCamp is used for most project management tasks while Trac provides bug tracking. WebEX is used extensively for information sharing.
Sectors:
Entertainment
