Relaunching The New Republic with Drupal 7

The New Republic launched their new Drupal 7 site on January 28th, 2013 with an exclusive interview of President Obama, and was featured in the New York Times, Huffington Post, and ABC News and received an enormous traffic spike on launch day. Hear the inside story of how TNR, Alley Interactive, and Pantheon did this site relaunch with Drupal 7.

TNR is a great example of the old guard print media (it has published continuously since 1914 and has a storied place in American political commentary) embracing the web, open source and Drupal. When Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes bought the magazine in 2012, he announced plans to completely rebrand and relaunch it, including and especially its web presence.

The session will touch on the technical philosophy of the rebuild, which focused on bold, forward-looking design, bringing the desktop and mobile experiences in close proximity to each other, de-emphasizing ads and pageviews, and creating a product that offers a rich reader experience.

Several technical details of the site build will be discussed, including:

  • Basic site architecture and mobile-responsive theme.
  • Content migration from the legacy Drupal 6 site.
  • Storing the reader's progress through an article and providing a "resume where you left off" feature synced across both desktop and mobile devices (with node.js integration)
  • Spoken-word versions of articles using SpokenLayer
  • Management of TNR print and web subscriptions using Stripe and the print fulfillment vendor's API.
Schedule info
Status: 
Proposed
Session Info
Track: 
Coding + Development
Experience level: 
Intermediate