KidPub (www.kidpub.com) was launched in 1995, making it one of the older sites on the web. Its mission is to encourage kids to write by giving them a worldwide audience for their creative work. Over the years we've won a lot of awards and had a lot of fun.
The original site was done in Perl and CGI. Back in those days there weren't many choices. The Linux server sat in my living room, and the local ISP couldn't figure out how to subnet, so we had a class C network all to ourselves. In 2000 we did a major rewrite, moving to PHP and a shared hosted server. The latest rewrite was completed in April of 2007, when we moved from custom PHP to Drupal, and to dedicated hosted servers.
Overall the move was a positive one. It took quite a bit of work to get the right 'look' for KidPub, since we had 12 years of history to carry along while at the same time giving a fresh feel. Some compromises were made in cases where some bit of functionality or design would have meant extensive customization in order to keep things easily maintainable. The Aurora theme was the best fit in terms of carrying some legacy design elements (the notebook paper) and offering a look and feel that appeals to our target audience of 10 to 14 year olds.
We're still making tweaks. Chapter-based books, quite popular with the kids, aren't displayed well. We struggled for a long time to figure out a way to give classrooms a page of their own...tried Organic Groups, various Forum tricks, and so on...and ended up with a simple View-based solution and just a few lines of customized code. CCK and calculated fields were a tremendous help here. Profiles are still a bit shaky, but usable. There's always a long list of things to do, isn't there?
Some near-term enhancements on the board are better iconic representation of different story types in tables and lists (poetry, book reviews, historical stories, and so on) as well as a simpler way for authors to upload audio files. The KidPub Schools page design is in its first pass and will improve.
The biggest challenge has come from popularity...we are almost constantly under web attacks of one kind or another. The latest round is a referrer attack that's tough to deal with. A bit of log analysis in Perl and constantly updated firewall rules seems to have quieted things down.
We've been really pleased with Drupal, and especially the support from folks here in this forum and others. Simplicity and flexibility were the two keys to a platform choice, and Drupal has come through on both accounts. We're running 5.1 on our production site, 5.2 in test, and starting to think about 6. A KidPub theme is brewing, too, though Aurora seems to be a good fit for now.
We'd welcome feedback on site design and usability, and if you have kids that like to write, be sure to bring them over!
Perry Donham
Publisher, KidPub Worldwide Publishing
www.kidpub.com
Comments
Ask for trouble!
Interestingly enough, about ten minutes after posting the topic above mentioning attacks, kidpub.com was hit by a Drupal-specific attack (comment spam). It was coming from a single IP and I was able to shut it down quickly, unlike the referrer attacks which use random IPs and are much tougher to combat. At least I knew that someone had read my post!
=-=
why using 5.1 ? with known XSS vulnerabilities ? in production? is it at least a patched version ? I'd hope so, after going public with your versioning. It sort of leaves you with your pants down.
_____________________________________________________________________
Confucius says:
"Those who seek drupal answers should use drupal search!" : )
Yup
We've got 5.2 ready to roll out for just those reasons. We spend way too much time responding to threats, and ours is a small site!