In June of 2011, Observer.com relaunched on WordPress, joining Betabeat.com and PolitickerNY.com to form a network of WordPress sites. Why was WordPress chosen to replace Drupal, the site’s CMS since 2007, and what are the comparative advantages of each system for a newsroom? How were 100,000 articles migrated from Drupal to WordPress, and how did the new site stand up to heavy load? Which plugins crashed the site, and which saved the day? This talk will range from a high-level business overview to a deep exploration of individual files in WordPress’s core.
Check out Austin’s slides: Migration from Drupal to WordPress
About the Speaker:
Austin Smith is a founder and partner of Alley Interactive, a software development firm in New York City which specializes in high traffic sites for news media, entertainment, and higher education. Alley Interactive was founded by ex-employees of The New York Observer, which converted to WordPress in June of 2011 after four years of running Drupal.