Drupal on Mt. Everest

www.myeverest.com is a free community site I have recently launched for people striving to achieve a big goal in their lives. The site enables individuals to have their own personal area, and to create pages & blog entries for it, using both a standard Drupal editor or a pda.

Who is using it? Three mountaineers are about to set off to attempt to climb Mt. Everest in April and May 2007 and they will be updating their individual MyEverest blogs with text, pictures and streaming audio using satellite phones and a pda as they climb up the mountain. Hopefully someone will be able to do an audio update live from the summit! This is all powered by Drupal, apart from the audio dial in service, which is provided by Hipcast.

I am one of the climbers, and part of the reason for posting here was to see if there might be someone who would be interested in providing some backup Drupal technical support if it’s needed during the two months whilst I am away. It should provide a somewhat unique experience with Drupal :) Message me or post here if you are interested – I’d be keen to hear from you and show you the inner workings of the site.

The site uses a customized theme and I am using the Captcha, Akismet, Subscriptions, Book, Tac lite, IMCE and FCK editor modules. Thanks to the maintainers of these. I also wanted to thank Dublin Drupaller for all his phptemplate snippets, because I found these very helpful when I was learning how everything in Drupal fitted together.

In MyEverest, the individual site effect is achieved using taxonomy, which took me a while to get my head around (this is my first Drupal site), but once I did, it’s been my friend ever since. Each site is its own term from a site vocabulary so when you go to a site, essentially you are seeing a group of different content types for a particular term. Without wishing to confuse people, the menus have also been done with taxonomy by assigning an optional menu term to certain content types. The menu is then generated by looking at the titles of all the nodes that have the menu term assigned to them. I got the idea from the taxonomy menu module.

I have tried to cache lots of items in memory to reduce database queries with the aim of speeding up the site particularly during peak times.

I just thought I would also add that I looked at a few other CMSs before deciding to go with Drupal. I had built a smaller site around Movable Type for our 2006 Expedition to Everest www.adlers.com.au - my wife made the summit, but I had to turn back just 100m below the top, hence why I am going back this year - but we found that it didn’t scale well (no pun intended!), especially during peak times with lots of visitors posting comments. As I wanted to make MyEverest be available to lots of climbers and not just me, I was particularly concerned about scalability, so prior to deciding to go with Drupal I tested several systems. Joomla was the closest, but after installing it and testing it for a week, I didn’t think that it would give me the flexibility that I needed for MyEverest and in particular the ability to be able to create the individual site effect. Drupal might look a little less friendly out of the box, but it’s really powerful and so far it’s been able to do everything that I have wanted and more. In fact, the more I have learnt, the more I am in awe of its power and flexibility.

Paul.

PS. I am keen to hear if there is anyone who might be interested in providing some backup technical support if it’s needed during the two months whilst I am away on Everest in April and May 2007.