Earlier this year the Popular Science web site was rebuilt with Drupal to much fanfare within the community. The new popsci.com is an example of how Drupal can perform at the “enterprise level”, and I think it’s fair to say that the site set a new gold standard for Drupal. So, I was thrilled to recently have the chance to work on the 2008 Best of What’s New “microsite” for popsci.com — BOWN is an annual event for PopSci, but obviously this was the first time it was built on Drupal.

I was working with Bad Feather, who had a contract with the Bonnier Corporation, publishers of Popular Science, to develop BOWN 2008. The project had to come together fast, but thanks to the hustle of Heather, Brad, Josh and I, and the PopSci editorial and technical teams, we launched BOWN 2008 on-schedule within the existing Drupal framework.

Obviously the heavy development work was already done thanks to the excellent existing Drupal site, but we had our work cut out for us adjusting the Drupal configuration, modifying the existing theme, and managing all of the BOWN content. On the Drupal side, we used the expected Drupal pillars: CCK to create a new content type for BOWN and make some small extensions to a few existing content types to hook into BOWN; and Views to create all of our custom node lists. On the theming front we created new page templates and theme functions to make BOWN match the graphic design spec we were given, including BOWN navigation, block and ad placements.

Check out the write-up of the original Drupal migration for background, then dig in to BOWN 2008!