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.

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Every night for the next month, while I am sleeping, all of the data in the Drupal 5 version of Observer.com will migrate to the Drupal 6 version. This means that our editors will always get to see yesterday's content on the build site of the Drupal 6 version and we will have witnessed more than 30 (hopefully) successful data migrations and have plenty of time to make adjustments. When we're ready to launch the site, we'll just let the data migrate as usual, then dump the newly created database and files directory, install them on the production MySQL and NFS servers, and change Apache's configuration to point to the Drupal 6 version--it couldn't be easier, and it won't take me longer than thirty minutes. So the why of this should be pretty obvious who's done this sort of migration before. But the how isn't so clear, or it wouldn't have taken me so long to get right.

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Azi Paybarah, the manic automaton that produces most of the volume on PolitickerNY just posted this to Twitter:

reactions to caroline kennedy's ny1 interview?

At midnight on Friday night, Azi is thinking about Caroline Kennedy, and presumably watching New York One. Freaking. Awesome. People like Azi make the otherwise obnoxious media business exciting. I like watching people who are enthusiastic about what they do, whatever that may be.

And yeah, I totally re-blogged a tweet. So sorry.

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I used to really hate Drupal.

That's probably a surprising thing for me to say. I'm the lead developer of Observer.com and Politicker.com, both of which use Drupal heavily. Observer.com was a very early instance of a high-profile newspaper running on Drupal, and it was built by Moshe Weitzman, a very early instance of a core Drupal Contributor. I saw Moshe most recently at Do it with Drupal in New Orleans where we shared the floor at a case study of Observer.com. After our presentation, he asked me to share some details of my transformation from a Drupal hater to a Drupal lover. I hope this might be of some use to other programmers coming into Drupal for the first time, and to the Drupal community as it continues to mature.

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