After The World using Drupal there is another site that is contributing to the unofficial goal of Drupal ("World Domination"); Die Welt using Drupal!

Die Welt (German for "The World") is a quality daily newspaper from Axel Springer, the largest publisher in Europe. They recently launched their new website (www.welt.de) and this week also launched an additional "sidekick site", a community portal where people can interact and debate with each other and journalists hence named debatte.welt.de. This last site is a Drupal site.

We had a short interview with the project lead of Welt Christian Ruhnau about why he had chosen Drupal and his experience with implementing Drupal in one of the largest quality newspapers of Europe.

Drupal: First off, congratulations on the great new site. We really like it. But how did you come up with Drupal?Christian: Thanks, we like the site as well. We wanted to have a more agile site apart from our main publishing site with a more disruptive technology angle. We wanted an open source tool since they tend to be more agile and we looked at several candidates, Joomla!, Typo3 and Drupal. Drupal was by our standards the best fit to our criteria.

Drupal: What were those criteria?Christian: Flexibility, scalability and freedom in design and templates. And of course most important, speed of development. We wanted to be able to deploy new sites quick and easy and that’s why ultimately we choose Drupal.

Drupal: So how did you learn about Drupal?Christian: We have been following Drupal for a long time. But we had no experience with implementing it in such a big project. The breakthrough came when IBM published their study last summer about Drupal. We saw that that they came up with the same conclusions as we did after our evaluation. That really strengthened us in our belief that Drupal was the right tool for the Job.

Drupal: What did you like and what didn't you like?Christian: I liked the fast way of getting things done which was very important for us. Other systems tend to have slower developer cycles and changes are harder to implement. For our specific needs, we created a set of custom modules, altered some contributed modules and we had to hack core a bit as well. For example, we had some performance issues with the blog section. Our developers found a way to make it n times faster but had to change something in Drupal core. We know this is usually not the best solution, but sometimes you have to sacrifice something to gain something else. We are planning to donate all changes and modules we created back to the community as we stated on our blog. …zudem werden wir unsere Drupal-Erweiterungen nach einiger Zeit im Netz zur Verfügung stellen. (which roughly translates to "...so we will after some time give all our Drupal modules back to the community")

Drupal: What were some of the problems you encountered?Christian: We encountered some problems regarding security with our own build modules and some performance issues. All of them were solved before we went live.

Drupal: So, how do you plan to align with the community?Christian: We just started and need to figure out what kind of user we attract, so this is also an experiment for us. I think we can tell you more in a few weeks, for now we try to build a platform which is very open and gives the user the opportunity not only to be the one who comments on articles. This is also reflected in our design, very much user centric and build around "faces", next to every post you have the possibility to show who you are. We hope we attract users who like to debate on our topics. As far as I can tell for now it seems to work, we did not have to delete any comments so far. We even displayed a small Druplicon on every page because we are proud of using Drupal and want to show it. We don’t know yet how we will align with the community, but as said we will contribute code and we need to figure out together with the developers what makes sense and what would maybe be too specific. We want to give something back which can be useful for many people out there in the Drupal community; we will talk about that in the next weeks. I cannot tell you exactly what we are planning, but there will be more sites coming from us in the next time which are powered by Drupal. We are also very aware that this project is being watched by multiple newspapers and I do think that our good experiences with Drupal will go around here for sure.
So you see, we are fast and Drupal is fast; a perfect combination!

Drupal: Thank you.Christian: No, our thanks go to the Drupal community. Making a platform that enables us to build our community sites!

So there you have it. Yet another big newspaper choosing for Drupal.