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By webstylemedia on
Shakefire.com - A one-stop destination for all your entertainment cravings. Movies, music, gaming, books and everything in between.
Shakefire.com is an entertainment portal with thousands of movie, tv, game and music reviews, exclusive interviews with talents and artists, free contests, millions videos and images.
Why Drupal was chosen:
We chosen Drupal CMS because its not just CMS, its framework (note to Dries - please do not make Drupal a second Wordpress, we know that you want to grow Drupal more in CMS way than framework, and we think its wrong).
We like to use built-in publishing functionality of Drupal CMS, its support for media (images, videos) processing, we love fields and entities.
At the same time its easy to extend Drupal with custom modules for custom functionality. So we usually use Drupal for basics but custom modules for everything else.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Shakefire.com is not a new website. It has been done several years ago, and Drupal 6 has been used for that version.
So main requirements for new website were: migrating to Drupal 7, improving speed and performance, extending functionality, implementing new look and feel.
One of the challenges were to migrate more than 50000 nodes to Drupal 7.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
These are pretty basic modules for functionality that every site must have.
For everything other we developed 34 custom modules. Each module implement specific website functionality: contests listings and blocks, reviews listings and blocks, videos listings and blocks, photos listings and blocks, interviews listings and blocks etc.
As you may see we don't use heavy-weight modules like Panels and Views. Actually we hate them :-) For example we don't understand why someone need to load 100M+ code just to output recent 10 nodes? In custom module it take around 15 lines of code only. For that reason we like to use Drupal as framework by implementing those custom modules. We don't need Views or Panels. Without using those modules we can make PHP memory_limit value lower and that gives more memory to apache, memcache and mysql processes.
We also heavily use caching modules like Boost and Memcache for performance improvements.
For now we use basic search module but we are going to migrate to Apache Solr shortly.
Team members:
Project team:
Dmitry Yeskin from Web Style Media, LLC
Sectors:
Entertainment
