The WGBH.org Development Blog

As previously mentioned we’ve decided it’s time to overhaul WGBH.org. New look and feel, new information architecture, new CMS to manage all of the wonderful content we have, bigger offices with comfier chairs for the WGBH Online staff - the whole shebang! Ok - just kidding about the offices and chairs! Gotta make sure you’re awake.

The $64,000 question then is, what’s the plan for building the new system? What technologies are going to replace our tried and true circa 20001 tools? Like all good consumers we gave this a lot of thought, kicked lots of tires, flipped lots of coins and ultimately decided to hitch our wagon to the star that is (drum roll, please) Drupal!

What is Drupal, you ask? In short, it’s a leading open source content management system, with a neat logo to boot.

The The name Drupal comes from the Dutch word druppel which means drop, hence the logo. More info on the derivation of the name here.

We chose Drupal for a whole bunch of reasons, including (but not limited to):

• Open Source - Our current CMS is an open source tool and we feel that the whole idea of open source dovetails nicely with the goals of public media, so we wanted to continue using (and supporting) open source.
• Rich Functionality - Of course, open source tools aren’t worth it if they can’t (reliably) do what you need them to do. Drupal has been around since 2001 (version 6 is about to launch) and is a very mature product, with a rich offering of core functionality and add-on modules that provide much of what we need right out of the box, especially lots of Web 2.0 bells and whistles (e.g. blogs, comments, RSS feeds, etc.)
• Flexibility - Being an open source tool if there is something which it doesn’t do but which we need we have the ability to modify it or (more importantly) add on to it using Drupal’s various APIs and hooks.
• Technology - Drupal is written in PHP, a well known scripting language, and uses MySQL, a well known open source relational database. Again, we like the open source thing.
• Performance and Scalability - Drupal is the engine behind many high profile and high volume web sites, such as The Onion, MTV UK, and Lifetime TV, so it has a proven track record of scalability and performance.
• Support - Drupal has a strong and active community of developers and users, available to answer questions and help with solutions. There are a number of companies and individuals offering Drupal consulting, development and training services (for example, Lullabot) should the need arise.
• Public Media Acceptance - A number of other public media companies are either already using Drupal or are in the midst of switching to it (e.g. WETA, NHPR, WXXI) and by other units within WGBH (e.g. The World, WGBH Lab). Being on a common platform with other public broadcasters and with other groups within our own foundation is very advantageous and should facilitate information sharing and application development and support.

Whew! See, once we considered all that we figured we couldn’t afford not to use Drupal!

In the end we settled on the following (warning: nerd terminology coming) technology stack for the new WGBH.org:

• CMS - Drupal, which means a code base written in PHP!
• Hardware & OS - Solaris. Drupal is often run on Linux, but we wanted to take advantage of existing hardware. So, no open source OS. You can’t have it all.
• Database - MySQL
• Web Server - Apache
• Code Control - Subversion

So, it’s Drupal run on SAMP (Solaris, Apache, MySQL, PHP).

In the coming days I’ll start talking in more detail about the build plan and some actual code writin’!