How do we handle 5 major Danish news sites, 250 online journalists, 5 million daily page views, 1 million news articles in the database and another 500 being added every day - all in one database? In 2009 the largest news publishing group in Denmark, Berlingske Media, started a migration of their largest sites to Drupal. The migration is currently half-way, and the current platform is among the largest Drupal installations in the world. The systems architects Christian Schmidt and Arne Jørgensen talks about the platform, including how multiple sites with individual editors are hosted in the same database, how content and media is entered, structured and presented, and the challenges with making Drupal scale. Presentation by Christian Schmidt and Arne Jørgensen at DrupalCon Copenhagen, August 25, 2010. http://cph2010.drupal.org/sessions/drupal-making-news

1. Drupal Making News
Arne Jørgensen & Christian Schmidt
25 Aug 16:00
Trellon

2. Agenda
• About Berlingske Media
• Fundamental architechtural decisions
• News articles as nodes
• Caching
• Questions

3. About us
• Arne Jørgensen (arnested)
Systems architect
• Christian Schmidt (c960657)
Systems architect

4. About
Berlingske Media
• Largest newspaper publishing group in Denmark
• Established in 1749 by Ernst Henrich Berling
• 62 print titles, including 11 national and regional
dailies
• 75 websites
o 6 million users per month (unique cookies)
o 175 million page views per month

5. BOND:
Berlingske on Drupal
• Project started in August 2008
• First site launched in May 2009
• Sites on BOND so far:
o Newspapers: www.berlingske.dk, www.bt.dk,
www.erhvervsbladet.dk
o Verticals/sub-brands: www.business.dk,
www.fri.dk, www.sporten.dk
o Community: www.løbnu.dk

6. Roles
• Journalist: Write news, choose pictures
• Editor of the day: Prioritize news
• Site manager: Modify Panels configuration
• Developer: Write modules and themes,
setup Panels
• Sysadm

7. Fundamental
decisions
• All sites in one database
• No Views, no CCK
• Lots of Panels
• Reverse proxy caching
• Dedicated backend for journalists
• All nodes have one primary term

8. All sites in
one database
• Several settings.php files that define
$conf['theme_default'], one $db_url
• 2.4 million nodes, including 1.2 million news articles
and 600,000 image nodes
• 60,000 taxonomy terms
• MySQL InnoDB with transaction support
• Master/slave database replication
• Unpleasant surprises …

9. Nodes
• Simple model
• Primary term
• URL alias
• Presentation tags (terms)
• Node references
• Node listings: By time, or node queues

10. Primary term
• Used for most node listings, sections etc.
• Determines page layout for node view
• Determines whether individual Panels
panes are visible
• Determines URL alias of nodes:
www.sitename.dk/section/node-title

11. Caching
• Memcache – take load off database
• Reverse proxy – take load off database

12. Next step
• Migrate regional sites to BOND
• New caching strategy for logged in users
•?

13. Questions?

14. http://cph2010.drupal.org/node/14248