By Robardi56 on

Don't know if this has been posted before, but I just found that http://usmagazine.com/ is running on drupal.

(it is not my site but is a great example).

Brakkar

Comments

jasonwhat’s picture

jasonwhat commented

It looks like they built the site. Very cool use of drupal and I wish companies like this would let the community know about what they've done and provide some tech specs. They are getting a great piece of software for free and should be willing to interact with community and share innovations.

hectorplus’s picture

hectorplus commented

yeah, very nice job there. Drupal can do this and a lot more!
I am working on 3 projects usind drupal right now, its been a great exprerience! Its powerful.

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merlinofchaos’s picture

merlinofchaos commented

Hey, that site is a billboard for Views. There's several of them in the front page.

-- Merlin

[Point the finger: Assign Blame!]
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]

-- Merlin

[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]

Robardi56’s picture

Robardi56 commented

How could anyone build a serious site without views ??

Views, Cck, blocks, regions allow ultimate flexibility.
Love it ^^

Brakkar

jasonwhat’s picture

jasonwhat commented

Yeah, I was noticing the pop-up they have for every celebrity that provides views in tabs. It'd be great if those who developed it explained exactly what was done. Unfortunately, it seems that big companies are afraid of people knowing that they are using...perish the thought...Free software! So, they don't write up their projects, which is so against the open source ideas.

orionvortex’s picture

orionvortex commented

Does anyone know how they created those teasers with the thumbnail of the image used in the article?

HSGuru’s picture

HSGuru commented

Dave Ganner
Home Security Guru - The web's largest Home Security resource

WillieBHines’s picture

WillieBHines commented

Hello. I work for ExpandTheRoom. We're not hoarding any secrets -- we've just been too busy to be responsible documenters. Also, we're still evolving our solutions -- so things are changing rapidly each day as we find the best way to do what we need.

We used a lot of CCK on the site -- almost every webpage is a custom content type. That's mostly because Us is a photo-heavy site. We needed to specify both a thumbnail and a full image for almost every content type. So we had to define our own blog type that included two imagefield fields.

All the photos are created locally and uploaded. We can't really have dynamic thumbnail creation because the editors are naturally picky about which part of a photo gets cropped for its thumbnail.

We HAD a lot of views, and Views is an indispensible module. We pared down as we realized that a lot of our "table of contents" areas needed to be manually entered as opposed to dynamically generated. That's because we wanted very specific control over which items appeared in which order.

The traffic is immense. We had some very crucial help from some Lullabots in optimizing that (and optimizing our templating and lots of other things), but it's still an ongoing battle. I'm dying for a file-based caching solution as I'm sure it would help with the heavy-hit pages on the site. Full disclosure: "Sure" = not benchmarked, but just a confident hunch.

The tabs in our star files is kind of a hack: We have a custom CCK type called star file. Each of the tabs appends a "/love" or "/bio" onto the URL. Then in the node-tpl-starfile.php we check arg(3) and show the appropriate field from the content type. It's not as complicated as it sounds, but it is just as dirty.

jasonwhat’s picture

jasonwhat commented

I retract my snarkiness above. Thanks for the info. Did you guys have to create a new image field for CCK or did you use the one in CVS now? I assume it was your own? Great job on the site.

WillieBHines’s picture

WillieBHines commented

Thanks, Jason! We're proud of the site. Although, as with any big project, we learned as we went and so there are already a huge list of things we want to do better. Some things we did smoothly, others we hacked in there. Sometimes there was a better answer, other times Drupal wasn't a natural fit.

We hired Lullabot to come in and help us along -- great guys, very invaluable service. That sped up our learning curve.

We used the imagefield that's in CVS. It works pretty well. There's the (documented, I think) problem where you sometimes/always have to create the node, and then go back and upload the image, and then save it. But still -- the presence of imagefield made things MUCH easier for our authors - a great addition. Really, CCK is amazing. It's what opens up Drupal to do really anything, in my opinion. Views was essential, too.

We ALMOST went with the category module. Well-thought out and very well documented. However, I had a feeling that it is fundamentally too different from how the drupal core code looks at taxonomy, and didn't want to risk it on a big site.

Image management overall was frustrating, but thanks to img assist and imagefield -- we did pretty well. usmagazine isa very image heavy site so I hope to improve the image management even more as we go on.

It feels like Drupal is in the middle -- right this very second -- of a big transformation. We tried to poise ourselves to be easily upgradable when 5.0 comes out. We'll see.

Any other questions or suggestions -- I'd love to hear them. I'm trying to answer more posts, having read the post on the front page today about the state of Drupal and the call to action for more people to chip in.

pcoskat’s picture

pcoskat commented

Willie -

Without compromising your clients, 'generally' speaking what does programming of a site like the US Weekly one cost? (again, just a range (excluding design), if you can give one).

WillieBHines’s picture

WillieBHines commented

You know what? I have no idea. For real. I do the code and try to stay out of the business side of things.
It's also complicated because we're paid as part of a bigger retainer that involved a previous redesign, ongoing maintenence, and work on other sites.

pcoskat’s picture

pcoskat commented

That makes sense - Thanks for getting back to me! Cheers! :)

pcoskat’s picture

pcoskat commented

Hey Willie -

If you ever freelance, drop me a line (I won't tell anybody ;) )

aperj’s picture

aperj commented

Willie,

I really like your site!!

I'm in the process of evaluating Drupal for a new social networking site and was wondering if you could comment on the amount of traffic your us mag site gets and how Drupal is holding up under the strain? Did you find that Drupal was *not* adequate for some tasks? Also, have you considered adding some social networking functionality to the site? We are considering using DZOIC handshakes "integrated" with Drupal for the social networking, have you used this one?

I know it's alot of questions here, but mostly just wanted to congratulate you and your team on a job well done!!

Thanks,

Aperj

NeoID’s picture

NeoID commented

That site's frontpage looks cool...
I'm quite new to Drupal and I'm currently working on a norwegian translation of it (80% done), but when it comes to the front design I'm not quite sure how to start. How do you set up a frontpage to look like this? What is the best way of organize all the nodes/blocks (?)? Is it hard-coded? Anyone who could give me a hand where to start? I really want to convert my site to drupal... :)