A partner of ours, Uusi Suomi, has been running a Wordpress MU (now called Wordpress MS) -based blogging community since 2008. The basic stuff – blogging – has worked relatively well there all the time. The use of the word “relative” instead of “great” is based on the fact that the platform was never the most up-to-date version of WPMU and much of the cool stuff that is available now was not there for Uusi Suomi. Anyway, the basic idea was – and still is – to have a community where different people could write blogs mainly focusing on politics and society. The blog posts would then be collected to a single front page and their popularity and various classifying stuff was implemented in order for the various blogs to become a community. The concept was clear but in spite of the site being a blogging platform, the implementation was found to have a lot of limitations.
Wordpress handles the blogging part really well. The community part – not so well.
How to get the ten most recent comments out of a WP community of 2000 user blogs? A) read through 2000 database tables, B) implement a custom functionality to aggregate all comments from all blogs. Crap.
How to add custom fields (we needed user type, political party etc) to a user? I don’t know enough WP to tell, but it was costly and slow.
How to tell which blog post is the most popular right now? Well, you could crawl the Apache access logs or something? (and they actually did)
In short, the community stuff was really painful to build with Wordpress. Maybe it’s just that the previous system was a bit old (yeah, I know Wordpress 3 fixes all) or something but it just wasn’t as easy as it should be. I don't know Wordpress nearly as well as Drupal, but it seemed hard for the WP experts aswell. I have never seen any code from WP so I can’t really tell why it’s hard.
OK, enough with the history. The customer wants a system that’s in their control and can handle the community stuff well. Clear-cut Drupal case, eh? That’s what we thought.
After a year of slow planning and around 3 months of implementation, we now have upgraded the WPMU system to Drupal. The new site contains all the blog posts (about 40 000 nodes) and the 500 000 comments that the previous system had in it, plus a number of new Drupal magic. The blog post popularity within the whole community and a single blog is generated by sophisticated radioactivity algorithms. New taxonomies and profile fields are now easy as 1-2-3. If we need to sort users by hair colour, we just create the profile field and clickety-click-create a view that only contains data from users with blond hair. Fifteen minutes (slow, I know, but we need to test these things, too) and that’s it.
Technical details in drupalspeak: Blog spaces created with Domain access, trending content metrics with Radioactivity, and all the cool listings with Views (naturally, but the point being that these modules support it). We also use Pressflow, Varnish, ApacheSolr, Flag, User Comment and Facebook Connect– to name some.
The project is a success. It was not a walk in park, don't get me wrong. Domain Access is such a special tool that it basically tries to get us in trouble anywhere it can. And I’m not blaming Ken Rickard (even if we never found out why our domain-views tried to perform 5000 SQL queries per page at one point), it’s just that it can be used for so many different purposes that building a blogging community is bound to cause problems. The good thing is that we beat the problems!
Yeah, and the site: http://puheenvuoro.uusisuomi.fi