Slovenske novice are Slovenian national daily newspaper with largest circulation on national level. Last week we lunched redesign of it's web variant, which is a news portal with about 200.000 unique visitors and 4.5 million impressions per month. This numbers wil definetely become larger soon, as they have monthly growth between 10 and 15%.
Site was developed on Drupal 7. We extensively used Panels and Views. Search is based on Apache Solr, driven by Search API framework. To achieve performance we used Memcached, Varnish, APC and developed some own cache expiration rules. This is how we achieved performance we needed and flexibility requested by editorial team. Everything is hosted on our own HA LAMP stack.
Just two days after launch we had national elections in Slovenia, which are also a big media event. Our site broke the record in daily visits and everything was working smooth.
Since a custom CMS, which was developed inside company about 10 years ago, was used before, one of the most important aspects of this project was experience for editorial team. They learned how to use Drupal surprisingly fast. There were some minor issues reported, but in general Drupal works really got for them.
Site was developed by core development team:
- Tadej Baša, @paranojik
- Primož Hmeljak, @theprimsi
- Tim Rijavec, @timrijavec
- Janez Urevc (me :)), @slashrsm
We also had some themeing help from Iztok Smolič (@Iztok).
We will publish some more information about project in the following weeks.