Patrick Beeson

Hamptonroads.com and Pilotonline.com, the Web sites of The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., have relaunched with a new content management system built entirely in the open-source platform Drupal.

This news provides a lot of street cred for Drupal among publishers. I believe it might also be the largest newspaper site(s) to use the CMS.

Scripps has used Drupal to power a few of the Entrepreneurial Fund sites such as MySaleMail.

I have yet to dive into building a site with platform, but I have learned the basics of how things come together with a project I was involved with shortly after arriving at Scripps.

I'm very interested to see how easily the folks in Norfolk can scale their Drupal instances with the shift from print to online.

As Drupalite Ryan Sholin pointed out in his blog entry on the same topic -- thanks for posting the news about this -- the team in Hampton Roads appears to have a solution for heavy traffic on a dynamic site (from Jeff Anderson's Drupal group entry):

Performance under a heavy load is perhaps our biggest concern about Drupal - the footprint for a site with as many modules, nodes and users as ours certainly isn't small. We are using the Boost module to protect ourselves from sudden traffic spikes, which for us are almost always caused by getting "Drudged", "Farked", "Dugg", or in our most recent major spike, "CNN-homepaged" when we had some exclusive coverage of a national story in our area - the Michael Vick dogfighting story. Since those events bring us a crush of out-of-market, unlogged users, the Boost module lets us serve those users flat pages - which we expire on a frequent interval - and save the database and application servers to provide dynamic content to authenticated users.

Scripps has also recently switched to a fully dynamic CMS with our Ellington implementations. Thankfully, the Django-based platform has many options for caching content, including the glorious Memcached, that reduces stress on the databases.

I'm also interested to see if the use of Drupal as a newspaper CMS spreads to other Landmark-owned properties such as the Greensboro, N.C. News and Record or my former employer The Roanoke Times.

Both of those properties use a different CMS: Saxotech Publicus and a home-grown ASP.NET solution respectively.

Regardless, this is a fine example of how open-source CMS solutions are spreading for the (online) newspaper industry.