By Fintan on

http://www.mailfriends.com/ the original penpals communitystarted in 1998, is now one of the most active friendship websites around

we launched our new look Drupal based site yesterday. We have over 8 million pages views per month and our growth rate is 15% month on month at the moment (and increasing). We have not started promotion yet, we only bought the site a few months ago so we expect these numbers to jump over the next six months.

It was a custom coded site that hacked together loads of different bits of opensource code and we have managed to migrate all of the features to drupal & the wonderful contributed modules.This was an extremely large project and we are proud that it is now live.

The new site is made up of:

  • 93 Modules
  • 75 Forums (OG based, some private, upgraded members only, role based, age based etc.)
  • Guestbooks
  • Private messaging
  • Ecards
  • Chat (non Drupal, we are working on a Jabber module but were not finished in time)
  • Photo Galleries
  • Profiles
  • Blogs
  • Notications
  • Frontpage
  • etc etc.

    • We have some more features ready to launch but are waiting for things to settle down as this was a huge change for the members and we want to give them time to get used to the new system (the 93 modules is just the current active ones, the new features mean the total goes to 116 modules).

    We still have some small bugs but we are busy fixing these and hope to have everything as we want it in the next few days, once this is done we are reviewing our code to see what code we can contribute back. We also did a lot of performance testing and will be releasing the results and our notes soon.

    This project is sponsoring Derek's work on the new release system http://drupal.org/node/90436 and the new testing environment.

    A huge thank you to the Drupal community and all especially the contributors.

    Feedback appreciated.

    ⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

    Comments

    alanburke’s picture

    alanburke commented

    I like the new look, fresh but still close enough to the original.

    Great to see a[nother!] prominent Drupal site developed in Ireland.

    Well done to all at Mailfriends.

    I'll be hoping for a presentation at the first Irish Drupal meet-up, whenever we get around to it!

    Regards,
    Alan
    www.athenryac.com

    Drupal development and themeing, Galway, Ireland

    jonnie.russell’s picture

    jonnie.russell commented

    No problems we'd be happy to do a presentation at the first Irish Drupal meet-up,
    any ideas when it will be ?

    Regards,
    Jonnie

    alanburke’s picture

    alanburke commented

    Hi Jonnie,
    I've started a thread about it here
    http://groups.drupal.org/node/1704

    Hopefully, we'll get something together.

    Later
    Alan

    Drupal development and themeing, Galway, Ireland

    alanburke’s picture

    alanburke commented

    ..is going ahead

    http://groups.drupal.org/node/2127

    It would be great to have someone, or indeed lots of people, from Mailfriends there.

    Later
    Alan

    Drupal development and themeing, Galway, Ireland

    rszrama’s picture

    rszrama commented

    Neat site... I did see this in the blog of one of your members: "Why can't we have a design that is designed for what we want, instead of what the owner wants or how we can see the most ads." To be honest, the huge banner ad on the right seems to be exactly what he's saying. Is the revenue from that going to outweigh the harm it might cause? Also, it just seems dumb to have that there and then have important menus on the right side pushed all the way off the page...

    Fintan’s picture

    Fintan commented

    And impossible to maintain and still add all the new stuff we wanted to do.

    Everyone hates ad's but that ad is the exact same as the one that was on the old design that they want back, we actually have less ads on the new site than the old one. Members have an option to upgrade and get rid of all the ad's.