After many months of preparation, we launched The E. W. Scripps Company's RedBlueAmerica.com, an interactive news and opinion website powered by the Drupal open source content management system.

To quote the press release:

[RedBlueAmerica.com] is designed to appeal to the significant percentage of Americans who are engaged in the political process and have a deep interest in the diversity of opinion in American society.

The site will serve as an ongoing public forum for a full array of user- generated content, including blogs, personal profiles, videos and more. While focusing at the outset on the 2008 election campaigns, RedBlueAmerica intends to provide the public with an open forum for a wide range of cultural and political views long after the votes have been counted....

"RedBlueAmerica.com is a place for people interested in what the other half thinks on the important and interesting issues of the day," said John Temple, founder of the Web site, and vice president of news for The E. W. Scripps Company's newspaper division. "It's a place where they'll always find the best thinkers on their own side stacked up against the best thinkers on the other side; a place for a lively and civil conversation about the topics people are talking about -- or should be talking about."

For us, the project initially began late summer 2007, when Scripps' Vice President of News, John Temple (who also happens to be Editor, President and Publisher of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver) and Scripps' Director of Marketing/Newspapers Linda Sease, along with the Rocky Mountain News' Interactive Editor Mike Noe, approached us with the initial concept for RedBlueAmerica.com.

After we worked on the architecture and development of a proof-of-concept version of the site, Scripps embarked on some usability testing. Afterwards, we got together to analyze the results. Then, really quite suddenly, we got the green light for the next phase, and over a period of two months we worked on the re-architecting and redesigning the site, followed by some very rapid development and theming.

In today's political climate, with both Democratic and Republican presidential nomination races still up for grabs, and the country still very polarized on so many major and minor issues, this seems to be an extremely timely project. John Temple and Scripps saw that, and hired some very talented moderators and managers to run the site, aggressively driving content and marketing. They also planned to leverage their not-insubstantial media holdings in newspapers and television stations, along with their respective websites in promoting the website and its content. This was not going to be a quiet launch.

The traffic projections were such that we had to anticipate and prepare for some fairly robust traffic and posting activity on the site, so we spec'd out and configured an enterprise-level multi-server hosting setup. We did some additional benchmarking and performance tuning to bring the site performance up. (We'll be continuing to watch the site and make adjustments over the coming days and weeks.)

The not-quite-standard page layout, and targeted Doubleclick advertising placement requirements, led to some interesting challenges in theming, including separating the comments (labeled "thoughts" on the site) from the nodes (aka "posts" for readers not familiar with Drupal), which ordinarily would load in tandem, so as to pull them up in separate containers on the page. (We could only blame ourselves for any interesting challenges due to the design, since we did the design ourselves.)

Some of the other things we did include integration with their Epsilon newsletter system and the creation of a custom voting widget combining image mapping, jQuery and the Drupal Voting API. We initially thought of adapting the existing fivestar module, but ultimately rejected the idea. The voting widget had to present no possible interpretation of bias, and fivestar's left-to-right paradigm could give the false impression that somehow "red" was greater than "blue." (We encourage you to check out the site and see what you think about the widget.)

Overall the experience of working with Scripps Vice President John Temple and Linda Sease -- and, later, with project director Allen Klosowski, search engine marketer John Stancliffe, red moderator Ben Boychuk and blue moderator Joel Mathis -- has been a supreme pleasure. It was a true collaboration and partnership.

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