9to5mac, Upgraded

This is obviously old news by now, but we’ve upgraded 9to5mac.com again.  We had some significant issues throughout the update (and there are still some things left to hammer out), but we’re back up to full speed.

There were a few objectives to the update:

1. Platform. We moved from Drupal 6 to WordPress 3.  We are losing a few benefits of Drupal, like pagecounts, extensibility and user functionality, but we gain so much more with WordPress.  Wordpress is lighter weight, fast moving platform and offers a wealth of plugins.  Hosting is also more efficient.  For writers, there is a better WYSIWYG and we can use our iOS devices to write and edit content and comments.   In the end, it was a no brainer.

2. Speed. We wanted to move to Cloud storage so that traffic would scale for the very busy times like Apple events or big stories where we’d often slow down or temporarily go offline.  Over the past two months we had a particular slowdown in our Drupal installation that our previous developers and MediaTemple weren’t able to sort out.  We needed more power.  Now we are on the Rackspace Cloud which should be close to unlimited bandwidth.  You should feel the difference.

3. Comments. We really enjoy comments.  Our previous commenting system was the Drupal standard.  It wasn’t good at keeping out spam, flexible logins, nesting or embedding multimedia.  With the move to WordPress and Intense Debate comments we have so many other options.  The downside is that longtime users will have to reclaim their login in Intense Debate or login using Twitter/Facebook.  We debated this for a long time but felt like t his was the way to go.  You can still comment anonymously but you’ll likely end up in the moderation queue whereas logging in should have your posts alive immediately.  All of your old comments are kept in the old posts.

4. Design. We liked most of what we did for our last design iteration and wanted to continue to clean it up, both to make the page load faster and to make the site easier to use and easy on the eyes.  The designers over at ThinkBrilliant did a great job for us there.

We really hope that you enjoy all of the new features on 9to5mac.com and that the DNS outages over the past two days were worth it.  As always, feel free to comment below (even if it is just to try out the new comments system!) on what you think and what you’d like to see.