The WGBH.org Development Blog

Hours before they were launched into the space, and few days before two of them became the first men to walk on the moon, the crew of Apollo 11 sat down for a hearty breakfast of eggs, toast, coffee and - of course - Tang!

Well we here at WGBH Online are getting ready for our own launch in just a few days. We’re not quite ready for the pre-launch breakfast, but we should probably go shopping for all the ingredients real soon.

A whole bunch of people are working feverishly right now to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s on our new TV Programs and Schedules module. Everything is going smoothly - knock on wood - and I think we may pull this off as planned. Suffice it to say, lots of coffee is being consumed.

The biggest development of late is that Pete has worked wonders to get the Boost module working for us on Drupal 6. Initial benchmarking tests indicate that Boost has increased our throughput by about ten-fold over the traditional Drupal database caching.

Boy, we love that.

Anyhow, keep your eyes peeled here for the big launch announcement - and get ready to start the eggs!

As they say at NASA we here at WGBH Online are in official launch mode! I can almost count on both hands the number of days until we light the candle under our new TV Programs and Schedules. The clock is ticking and we’re very busy trying to make sure this rocket won’t explode on the launch pad.

Our new production system is up (well, mostly) and ready for our content producers to begin entering content in preparation for launch. This mainly involves adding information to TV programs that we don’t get through our PBS/TV Guide data feed (series descriptions, photos, related sidebar items, etc.).

The only piece of the puzzle that we’ll be unable to have in place in time for launch is memcache integration. As of now, there isn’t a version of the module yet for Drupal 6. I asked Robert Douglass - one of the memcache module maintainers and somebody we’ve worked with in the past and a good guy - about the D6 version of memcache and he said it’s coming soon. In the meantime, we’re preparing to launch with traditional Drupal database caching.

What could wrong?

So the plan here is to get the content producers producing, well, content on the new system next week while Pete and I and our beloved buddies in the IT department work on system and application benchmarking and tuning. We’re having a MySQL consultant come in next week to help tune that end of things. I’ve been running benchmarking tests using Apache’s ab utility, and Pete has been tinkering with getting the Boost module (a file-based caching mechanism) running on D6. I was aware of Boost before but we hadn’t been planning on using it at launch, but now that memcache is on hold we’re giving it a go.

Again, really, what could wrong?

Oh yeah, plus I have a bunch of work to do to integrate the new TV schedules with the rest of WGBH.org which is not yet being ported to Drupal (like, um, the home page).

The biggest news of this week, however and by far, is that we had a visit by a very special guest - Drupal core developer (and local resident) Moshe Weitzman! You know somebody is important in the Drupal world when they have a URL like drupal.org/NAME.

We made the connection with Moshe a few weeks back and he’s been kind enough to offer some Drupal help and advice that’s already saved us a lot of headaches. So, we wanted to meet him in person to say thanks.

Moshe came by and we gave him a tour of the new WGBH facilities and then he, Pete and i went across the street and had a nice lunch. Moshe is a very nice guy and we had a great time meeting him and talking Drupal (amongst other things). In fact, Moshe was the one who encouraged us to give Boost a try. Thanks Moshe!

There you have it! Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for me to get back to mission control.