Liberals also turned off the heat and electric!

[Partha]

http://www.redstate.com/stories/miscell ... _your_help

When we started RedState in May of 2004, we used a website program called Scoop — the same program a lot of similar sites on the left used. But, as the number of visitors to our site grew, Scoop kept crashing on us.

If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.

Well, we didn’t close down. We ditched Scoop and moved to the best alternative at the time, a program called Drupal. But, in accomplishing the switch, budget constraints forced us to sacrifice some popular site features in order to alleviate the strain on our overused servers.

Needless to say, we always regarded those “downgrades” as temporary, and we hoped to restore the eliminated features – and to add new and even better ones – as soon as we could afford to.

Unfortunately, we still can’t afford to. But we’re convinced that America can afford even less to have us operating at anything less than our absolute peak potential during the coming presidential election season.

So we’ve decided to move ahead with our upgrades without delay, and despite not having the cash on hand – hoping and praying that RedState.com readers like you will help us make up the shortfall with a generous donation.

[Garrdor]

[Klast Brell]

If they are such smart republicans why can't they raise the revenues they need without begging for a handout?

[Partha]

If they are such smart republicans why can't they raise the revenues they need without begging for a handout?

Well, you know, I guess the ACTUAL owners of the site (Eagle Books) just can't afford good software. Who knew?

[Ddrak]

If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply.

What the fuck? Scoop is open source. It's written in perl, which is pretty damn common. If there's serious bugs then you'd think kuro5hin, dailykos or any of the other sites that run scoop would have hit them a long time ago, but I guess redstate was either too cheap to hire a perl dev and is now paying for it, or they decided to be whiny little bitches and blame some vast left wing software conspiracy...

Dd

[Partha]

I just thought I'd add this post exchange from there to get your thoughts, Dd. It appears they originally went from Scoop to Drupal, and are now going to Django.

Troubled. by Jeff Eaton

As a developer who's gone down the road of hand-crafting CMS software from scratch and felt the pain over the long haul, I wish you the best of luck.

I'm a bit biased -- I'm one of the core developers on the Drupal project, and my ears perk up when I hear of a site experiencing problems. I hope that you don't feel that there's been a lack of help from the Drupal community: I noticed that over the past two years there appear to have been only two posts from folks that are affiliated with your site on the Drupal.org support forums, issue queues, and other community support resources. The volunteers that make up Drupal are a tremendous resource, and if you're looking for help it's a shame to overlook them, especially considering your concerns that liberal organizations already have an advantage in volunteer time.

I note that you don't seem to have a number of Drupal's built in caching and performance enhancing features turned on (you're serving up individual CSS files, when it can automatically consolidate and compress them into a single one), and you're also running the Devel module. It's intended for troubleshooting and administrative use, and can cause its own performance problems when left running on a live production site. Also, you've turned on 'Full HTML' input for users. That's a pretty significant security risk, as it allows malicious folks to post HTML that contains XSFR attacks, Javascript code, embedded XSS exploits, and so on.

It sounds like you have a primary developer who's more comfortable working in django and python than Drupal and PHP -- it's perfectly understandable, and if you've had difficulty securing help from experienced Drupal developers it's understandable. Over the long haul, it makes sense to work with the technologies your committed developers are most familiar and comfortable with. I'd just hate to think that your decision would be based on a mistaken idea that political bias in the Drupal community -- with its thriving volunteer and commercial ecosystems -- is preventing you from receiving help when it's needed.
Reply To This — User Info — #36


Political bias was in Scoop community, not Drupal by Neil Stevens

We just don't like Drupal, and our users were disappointed with it ever since we went from Scoop. It's just not a good fit. We had an established user base, and a relatively non-technical one. The transition lost features and was unpleasant for many users.

I was surprised with it when I first heard we were moving to it. For a PHP engine it's rather good, since so much PHP code out there is total garbage. But even so, the PHP community drags Drupal users down. Even if the core is stable and secure (I'm subscribed to the security RSS because I help another site that uses Drupal, The Minority Report), if you watch the security announcements, the third party development is riddled with security problems that need patched.

The result is that if you want to have something secure added onto the Drupal core, you probably have to hire your own competent developers and write it yourself. However, Red State's long-time technical developer doesn't do as much for the site as he used to (hey, anyone doing THAT much unpaid work is going to burn out sooner or later on it all) and, well, no matter how driven for Red State I am, I'd never volunteer to write PHP on my own time for it.

So yeah, as it turns out, both Red State's contractors and their potential new free developer (me) would much, much, much rather work with Django and Python than Drupal and PHP.

It's not really so much a knock on Drupal as much as the fact that Drupal just isn't right for what we want. I'd still recommend Drupal to someone who wants to launch a small site quickly, with little technical knowledge needed after installation.

I almost want to highlight the points I laughed at, but that would be mean.

[Ddrak]

I'd suspect they didn't really try to get help with Scoop either, or wanted someone to do their customization for them that wasn't really part of the core development effort - most open/free software devs I know are certainly left leaning in their political stances (or just anti-corporations at least), but take a lot of pride in their work and would certainly fix any real bugs and crashes that were reported.

As for $25k, seriously, wtf. If it's truly "grass roots" then you should easily find devs and artists that would donate their time to help out. Money for hosting I can understand, but that's only a grand or two and advertising on a prominent site could easily offset that.

I doubt that it's any sort of scam, just general management incompetence.

Dd

[Partha]

From what I understand, the parent company (Eagle Publishing) has invested $55k into the 'upgrade', with $20k of that being software? It just doesn't seem like they're even trying, or is that me?

[Ddrak]

It depends on how you're costing it. You could easily chew up that sort of cash if you're paying a full-time developer and graphic artist to do fancy things with the site. On the other hand, if it's a community based site then you'd think they could rope at least a couple of people into donating time. If it's all licensing costs then... wow. Sounds like they bought into glossy brochures or something.

Dd

[Arathena]

It depends on how you're costing it. You could easily chew up that sort of cash if you're paying a full-time developer and graphic artist to do fancy things with the site. On the other hand, if it's a community based site then you'd think they could rope at least a couple of people into donating time. If it's all licensing costs then... wow. Sounds like they bought into glossy brochures or something.

Dd

Wait. You mean you can't trust marketing info?