MTV-UK launches ambitious Drupal site

You can always get far by working in a team, internet gives us the ability to work as a team with a lot of people around the world and with no physical contact.

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Mini Juegos

This hit the front page of the Entertainment section - great work!

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BuyBlue.org

Thee fact that the design is not conventional is another plus point in showing how flexible Drupal can be.

Hi all,

This is Alec from MTV UK - I've been a bit absent from the boards as our team are currently swamped with the launch of a new channel launching next week - MTV Flux. The launch of Flux is the main reason we moved away from our website running Dynamo, Sybase and a custom built CMS tool managed by MTV's technology group (used on a pan-euro basis). Our requirements to have a number of community tools in place, along with traditional cms functionality could not be met in the timeframes required unless we moved development for our services to our local MTV region. We had to replicate the existing website and users over to Drupal, as well as build out the whole new section for MTV Flux. Timelines were short, requirements kept changing. I think the final designs and functionality for the MTV Flux parts were only handed over to Lullabot about three weeks before we needed them to go live, so they did a fantastic job making this all come together.

Design side of things - (not my area - lol), each "channel" area of the site follows the official channel branding used on and off TV which is very familiar to our audience. The interesting thing with the mtv.co.uk site, is that it is in effect a series of subsites for each channel (9 broadcast, 2 mobile TV and 1 broadband) - that each has a different target audience. Keeping the mtv2 fans happy compared to mtv hits is a constant juggling act!

With MTV Flux there was quite a rush to get this launched for August 1st (MTV's 25 Birthday), and that may show in places - since then our team (currently two people - but Im looking for some new developers (I'll post a specific mention for that)) and Lullabot have been working on rolling out bug fixes, updates, performance improvements. Our graphics team and editorial team have also been putting new elements together. We have just completed a big usability review of the Flux section and will be looking to implement a number of updates to improve the site. There's a lot of editorial missing in places to help guide people through various processes.

Another area we've been working hard to improve is our hosting. We're running on a shared LAMP platform managed by our technology hosting group - of which a number of other MTV sites use. Two big new servers are being put in place this weekend, and we should also be moving to a new database server early next week - the current database server appears to be a big bottleneck in our ability to serve pages quickly. (We have high concurrent usage of the site).

I should be attending EuroOscon and DruaplCon - and will be speaking with Lullabot on how we implemented the new mtv site along with our learning's, the patches, updates and modules that have been contributed back to the community and giving more of an insight into how it's running, how we plug it all into our TV and mobile stuff, etc.

I'll try and keep an eye on the forums - so would welcome any feedback. If there are any specific questions that you would like us to cover off at DrupalCon, do send me a message or use our feedback form at http://www.mtv.co.uk/contact

Cheers,
a.
(Oh btw - I guess Im meant to say somewhere here that the comments above are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of mtv - yawn!).

Like Markus above it would be great to see some about the infrastructure, it's interesting to see how a site with X hundred users concurrently online would be handled with 40+ modules, look forward to seeing this in the future!

Great job

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http://www.AnfieldRed.co.uk

Yes .. sIFR .. and I see FlashObject.js (perhaps should be updated to SWFObject?).

By the way I use FlashBlock extension in Firefox, so sIFR can't work. The regular titles are displayed, but they are white on a white background. I only saw them when I moved the mouse over.
But a simple css rule with color: #000 for these links should fix it :)

This is very disturbing.

It seems that the people doing moderation on this site have become much too close with one development group. People have had valid comments deleted, others have had accounts terminated. The connecting factor in all of this is that the victims of this over-zealous moderation have shown themselves to be critical of Lullabot. (please don't get me wrong, I am not saying that lullabot has not contributed to drupal, they have, and are a tallented group of folks)

When we can't even debate this site, things have taken an ugly turn for the worst.

Where is the transparancy (that should be at the core of any f/oss project)?

If one group becomes beyond criticism the community as a whole suffers.

There is a discussion in the drupal developers mailing list right now about the direction to take for the default theme in drupal 5. The debate that was removed from the site damages that developer discussion. I came back to this page to get info on the criticisms of the mtv uk design because I remembered an interesting debate having existed at this url. That debate is now gone. Down the memory hole. Big Brother loves drupal?

I'm not sure what the correct forum is to demand accountability on this, but I'll look for it and raise this there.

I think the target demographic is probably fine with flash. Look at any major media sites these days. The all use flash. Some are mostly flash. On the same token, this site also probably doesn't sit well with people who don't like pop or rap music, or TV.