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the reporter's notebook of Christopher Mims

How the hell did Fast Company set up a user community so quickly, and with a small team?

So you know how Fast Company has all of a sudden integrated a whole community solution into their site? Well I was wondering how they did it — I mean they don’t have a huge budget, and they did it really fast.

Then I saw their site on a list of companies that use Drupal to build their entire sites, and it hit me:

Drupal has native community features

Now I’m not saying that every media organization on earth could follow in their footsteps, mostly because Drupal demands an entire suite of skills many web teams don’t have (but should…) but it just illustrates what really small, nimble teams can accomplish when they’re not fettered by legacy systems — or are willing and able to jettison them.

Every day I see examples like this — small, nimble organizations taking out much larger ones at the knees, mostly because they have no sacred cows. What I wouldn’t give to have a 6d10 +10/+5 sword of bureaucracy slaying…

Update: Dave Cohn, from whose twitter stream I originally gleaned the post on sites that use Drupal, himself an experienced Drupal slinger, did an interview with Ed Sussman, who redid the Fast Company site.

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2 Responses

  1. Digidave says:

    Check out the interview I did with Ed Sussman about it: http://www.beatblogging.org/blog/2008/02/ed-sussman—wh.html

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