5 ms·

Building a Better Submission Form

53 points by meghan 16y ago

fr0man 16y ago
Nifty, but I could see this causing aggravation on the backend (i.e. using the data from one generation of your form to another). Still, very flexible.
knieveltech 16y ago
Entirely typical for the industry, they waste untold developer hours dicking around with a single feature when the could have just installed an open source CMS and gotten the feature (and all kinds of other stuff) as part of the package. Grade: D
- jcapote 16y ago
  Yea, cause the New York Times could totally run off a simple Drupal install... Grade: F
  - knieveltech 16y ago
    Actually, I'm quite confident the Times website and their cluster of associated web services could, in fact, run off of a Drupal install. Care to share your thoughts on why that wouldn't work? How much experience do you have with Drupal? With building newspaper websites? Full disclosure: I'm a co-maintainer of 8 contributed modules for Drupal and have 3.5 years experience building websites and associated services (with a variety of tools, including Drupal) for the 3rd largest newspaper conglomerate in North America.
  - coolnewtoy 16y ago
    http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2006/mar/29/scripps/ http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2006/mar/29/scripps/ apparently several newspapers run off a Django install, including the newspaper that employed the web developers who wrote it: http://notesofgenius.com/django-web-framework http://notesofgenius.com/django-web-framework
  - ryanwaggoner 16y ago
    I have no idea why you're getting so many upvotes. I have yet to see anything about NYTimes.com that would preclude it running on Drupal. It seems to be working for whitehouse.gov, fastcompany.com, thenation.com, economist.com, and quite a few other high traffic sites. EDIT: And I also have done Drupal development for several high-traffic magazine and newspaper sites that get millions of monthly visitors.
    - bkudria 16y ago
      I spent some time at the NYT. I've also spent some time working with Drupal. Scaling Drupal is somewhat proven, and it seems to work for those sites. But, according to compete.com, the traffic figures (uniques) for March 2010 are: nytimes.com: 14,008,884 whitehouse.gov: 1,878,251 fastcompany.com: 1,537,072 thenation.com: 491,232 economist.com: 400,613 That is, nytimes.com gets almost 7.5 times the traffic as whitehouse.gov, and almost 35 times the traffic of economist.com. Oh, also, don't forget about.com, which, at 40,511,000 uniques in March 2010, has almost 2.9 times the traffic of nytimes.com. So, there's that. Then, the NYT has some ... unique requirements. Drupal just doesn't cut it for various the reasons, the clearest of which is the need to support all the non-tech-savvy journos and editors who actually create the gargantuan amount of content published by nytimes.com. There is a reason a custom CMS was written.
      - ryanwaggoner 16y ago
        Color me skeptical. Please explain how the technology for scaling to several million visitors won't cut it for several tens of millions? And do you really think that the other sites have editors and journalists that are any more tech savvy than NYT's are? Drupal is completely flexible and configurable, on both the public side and the CMS side. I'm not arguing that Drupal is the best choice for NYTimes.com, but it's very doable, and hardly the ridiculous option that the OP made it out to be.
        handelaar 16y ago
        Well, having been bitten by Drupal in this way repeatedly (before eventually stopping using it altogether), the thing to notice about those million-plus Drupal sites is that nobody's logged into them. The same cannot be said for the NYT. Drupal doesn't know how to cache anything at all other than for anonymous users. Start logging users in and your problems really get going around the 200-concurrent-users mark, not the 200,000-user mark. At 80-plus queries per page (which for Drupal isn't very many) the database just dies on its arse even at relatively trivial loads when you have multiple concurrent users.
kj12345 16y ago
I think this is a great example of a form mapping more cleanly to a key value store than a relational DB. Submissions to forms like this are documents in the sense that they need to be recorded as-is. If the user moves or changes their name down the line its actually a feature and not a bug that these records won't be updated.
sekou 16y ago
Besides the scalability of non-relational data stores, would the increased flexibility in object creation and modification be enough of a reason to make the switch? Would object-relational mapping be a comparable solution?
- misterbwong 16y ago
  It depends :) If your data doesn't lend itself to an RDB schema, go with a NoSql/key value store.

53 points by meghan 16y ago

Nifty, but I could see this causing aggravation on the backend (i.e. using the data from one generation of your form to another). Still, very flexible.

knieveltech 16y ago

Entirely typical for the industry, they waste untold developer hours dicking around with a single feature when the could have just installed an open source CMS and gotten the feature (and all kinds of other stuff) as part of the package. Grade: D

jcapote 16y ago
Yea, cause the New York Times could totally run off a simple Drupal install... Grade: F
- knieveltech 16y ago
  Actually, I'm quite confident the Times website and their cluster of associated web services could, in fact, run off of a Drupal install. Care to share your thoughts on why that wouldn't work? How much experience do you have with Drupal? With building newspaper websites? Full disclosure: I'm a co-maintainer of 8 contributed modules for Drupal and have 3.5 years experience building websites and associated services (with a variety of tools, including Drupal) for the 3rd largest newspaper conglomerate in North America.
- coolnewtoy 16y ago
  http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2006/mar/29/scripps/ http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2006/mar/29/scripps/ apparently several newspapers run off a Django install, including the newspaper that employed the web developers who wrote it: http://notesofgenius.com/django-web-framework http://notesofgenius.com/django-web-framework
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago
  I have no idea why you're getting so many upvotes. I have yet to see anything about NYTimes.com that would preclude it running on Drupal. It seems to be working for whitehouse.gov, fastcompany.com, thenation.com, economist.com, and quite a few other high traffic sites. EDIT: And I also have done Drupal development for several high-traffic magazine and newspaper sites that get millions of monthly visitors.
  - bkudria 16y ago
    I spent some time at the NYT. I've also spent some time working with Drupal. Scaling Drupal is somewhat proven, and it seems to work for those sites. But, according to compete.com, the traffic figures (uniques) for March 2010 are: nytimes.com: 14,008,884 whitehouse.gov: 1,878,251 fastcompany.com: 1,537,072 thenation.com: 491,232 economist.com: 400,613 That is, nytimes.com gets almost 7.5 times the traffic as whitehouse.gov, and almost 35 times the traffic of economist.com. Oh, also, don't forget about.com, which, at 40,511,000 uniques in March 2010, has almost 2.9 times the traffic of nytimes.com. So, there's that. Then, the NYT has some ... unique requirements. Drupal just doesn't cut it for various the reasons, the clearest of which is the need to support all the non-tech-savvy journos and editors who actually create the gargantuan amount of content published by nytimes.com. There is a reason a custom CMS was written.
    - ryanwaggoner 16y ago
      Color me skeptical. Please explain how the technology for scaling to several million visitors won't cut it for several tens of millions? And do you really think that the other sites have editors and journalists that are any more tech savvy than NYT's are? Drupal is completely flexible and configurable, on both the public side and the CMS side. I'm not arguing that Drupal is the best choice for NYTimes.com, but it's very doable, and hardly the ridiculous option that the OP made it out to be.
      - handelaar 16y ago
        Well, having been bitten by Drupal in this way repeatedly (before eventually stopping using it altogether), the thing to notice about those million-plus Drupal sites is that nobody's logged into them. The same cannot be said for the NYT. Drupal doesn't know how to cache anything at all other than for anonymous users. Start logging users in and your problems really get going around the 200-concurrent-users mark, not the 200,000-user mark. At 80-plus queries per page (which for Drupal isn't very many) the database just dies on its arse even at relatively trivial loads when you have multiple concurrent users.

kj12345 16y ago

I think this is a great example of a form mapping more cleanly to a key value store than a relational DB. Submissions to forms like this are documents in the sense that they need to be recorded as-is. If the user moves or changes their name down the line its actually a feature and not a bug that these records won't be updated.

sekou 16y ago

Besides the scalability of non-relational data stores, would the increased flexibility in object creation and modification be enough of a reason to make the switch? Would object-relational mapping be a comparable solution?

misterbwong 16y ago
It depends :) If your data doesn't lend itself to an RDB schema, go with a NoSql/key value store.