Economist.com - Providing Tools to Support the Severe Contest Online

I (Greg) have been reading the Economist since I was a teenager, so I was quite excited to hear that they were going to be moving to Drupal. Of course, I was even more excited when I got the opportunity to work on the project.

The Economist provides a variety of services, but their most popular one is the very dense newspaper they deliver each week full of insightful articles. As printed media undergoes an enormous change in the age of online delivery, The Economist draws inspiration from the Prospectus and their mission statement to find a purpose:

To take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy timid ignorance obstructing our progress.

Growing Venture Solutions has engaged with developers at The Economist and many other fine consultants including Cyrve and Four Kitchens. We are working with their scrum teams to build the tools necessary to host a severe contest online. Included in these tools are features that drive at the heart of Drupal: content management, identity, rating, and individually focused customization.

Much of the work is making its way back to the Drupal community. The Views Bulk Operations and Voting API modules have seen some improvements already. The amazing Table Wizard and Migrate modules were vastly improved as a result of their use importing data into the site. As we move beyond the migration stages of the project, we should be able to make even more improvements to Drupal.