After nearly 24 hours of struggling with our new production cluster, two weeks of testing, two months of development, two months of design, and a really long time of seriously headache-inducing brainstorming, Observer.com is finally running Drupal 6, with a totally new look and a totally new philosophy. I owe a post about how we did what we did and what tools we used, but that's tomorrow. I will also provide the source code for every custom module we wrote for the new site as soon as I figure out how to license it. This post is just a thank you note to our staff, partners, and members of the Drupal community who were particularly helpful--on IRC, in person, and some just by writing awesome code.

Staff at The New York Observer

Tamara Olson imagined the whole concept, built the wireframes, and guided her vision through design, development, and QA. Cathy Smith did the graphic design, and Theresa Summa sliced the resulting PSDs, converted them to Drupal templates, and did the bulk of the theming work. Matt Johnson built parts of the backend, built the server infrastructure for it, and saved my neck numerous times. Brian Kroski hired all of us and let us build this project in the first place, and along with Sidney Lisojo, the project manager, represented the project to the rest of the organization. Preston Gisch ran focus groups and developed SEO strategy, and Pablo Cohan and Deb Opp led the ad network integration effort. The incomparable editorial triumvirate of Tom McGeveran, John Vorwald and Joe Pompeo worked with us to set the course for the new site while continuing to edit the old one. Peter Kaplan constantly reminded us that we were building a site for a newspaper without ever saying so.

Partners and Consultants

Dagny Prieto helped us solidify our designs. Uwe Kristen at Boyle Software helped us with slicing and CSS issues, especially browser compatibility. Jeff Eaton at Lullabot reviewed code and advised our migration strategy. Evan Vetere, Derrick Pate, and others at Voxel helped us through the actual migration--we absolutely couldn't have done it without them. We host all our servers with Voxel, run our site behind their VoxCAST CDN, and rely on them for all matter of tuning beneath the application itself. I can't say enough good things about any of these vendors.

Drupal Community

Earl Miles, Moshe Weitzman, and Mike Meyers listened to my implementation ideas at Do it With Drupal. Moshe built the original Drupal version of Observer.com with Barry Jaspan, and Earl and Mike have been sources of great advice.

Derek Wright, Chad Phillips, and others let me take a break from The Observer and spend some time upgrading the project module to Drupal 6 with them at the sprint in Boston, and then didn't shoot me when my migration script broke PIFT during the drupal.org upgrade.

Some totally unexpected help in the form of great code: Robert Douglass and others on the Apache Solr module team built some killer software that makes search a breeze. We're really happy with our Solr-powered search. I can't wait to do more with it. Daniel Kudwien saved me a huge amount of time with his awesome WYSIWYG API. I'll include a list of all the installed modules with a summary of the site later; these are just the ones that I had little prior experience with that really impressed me.

Switching to IRC nicks now and repeating some: webchick, drewish, chx, tha_sun, merlinofchaos, eaton, quicksketch, and dmitrig01 all provided very sound advice on IRC.

And, of course, thanks to Dries Buytaert for leading Drupal to become a strong and stable platform suitable for websites of any size (and for protecting Observer.com from literally millions of spam comments, but that's another post!).

It's hard to guess what will become of online media--especially newspapers, but it's sure to involve Drupal. Thanks to the entire community--you make the Internet great.