Just launched another site for Columbia; Drupal 7 this time

After completing the EPIC site, Jon and I had the opportunity to build another Drupal site for Columbia University. There's a bit of a technical description of it on my portfolio page. Here are a few implementation notes.

We felt Drupal 7 would be up to the task for this project, and their IT team agreed. It was a real pleasure to be able to take advantage of the terrific theming system improvements. There were a few minor problems with module compatibility, but they were quickly solved with some patches that were easy to find on Google. Even though D7 still has a little wet paint and a few features that haven't been ported over from 6 yet, I'm finding it to be quite stable and to perform well.

Probably the most frustrating part was serving video. They wanted to host them on their server, so we tried using the media module. It's a great module, but video handling is still a bit rough to customize. I'm going to take another look at it in a few months. But eventually we decided that hosting on the server maybe wasn't such a good idea, unless we were to set up streaming. Plus, some of the videos were over 100MB, and couldn't be directly uploaded from the web page. So we outsourced video content delivery to Vimeo, who have both superb performance and a great user interface.

The theme we built is a subtheme of Omega, which is becoming one of my favorite starting points. It's a 24 column/960 grid, HTML5-based theme. One of the very cool things about Omega is the Delta module. You can use in conjunction with the Context module to create a separate set of theme settings for various parts of the site, based on page context. Quite remarkable!

Columbia wisely decided to use a high performance hosting facility, so we recommended Blackmesh. I've  spoken with them at the last few Drupalcons and was very impressed with their knowledge of scalability and performance, and am glad to have finally been able to work with them. They have a wonderful support team, very professional and highly skilled. We are using a fully managed server, letting Blackmesh take care of the everyday security and tuning work. They are very responsive to requests and have installed everything we needed for a great site.

We've recently moved from Subversion to git, which has also helped quite a bit with sanity management. No more thousands of little .svn directories all over the place (my pet peeve). Git is such a high performance system that branching now costs almost nothing (it was something mostly to be avoided with svn). This allows for a nice granularity when working on issue tickets.