At Cronen-Townsend Consulting, I am building the back-end of a new web site for the Boston Review using the Open Source content management framework Drupal. The site will incorporate current standard features, like a block showing the most recent comments, sharing with all popular social-network sites, and a block showing today's most popular content.

Because the new site is being built on top of the powerful content management framework Drupal it will be able to easily incorporate future web innovations as the Boston Review community evolves. There are currently Drupal modules that implement all web technologies (at around 4000 contributed modules, and growing rapidly). And with the Drupal community doubling in size each year all web-technologies should be implemented for the foreseeable future. (See the recent keynote at DrupalCon 2010 by project-founder Dries Buytaert).

In addition, I am designing a process that can automatically post the content of an entire issue of BR on a private preview site for the editors of BR, save an archival XML version of the content and associated files, and push any content to the live site when and if the BR staff chooses. The archival form is being designed to be easily-translated to future format (such as new eBook formats), so this will put the BR content on a solid foundation for the future.

The new site is going to live on a Rackspace cloud server, which will allow it to accommodate spikes in demand, feature sophisticated Apache Solr searching, and position it to incorporate new hosting technologies for Drupal soon after they are developed. (Rackspace was a platinum sponsor of DrupalCon 2010 and I learned a lot about cloud hosting at the conference. They also partnered recently with Dries Buytaert's company Acquia).

All together these activities comprise what I call architecting the future of the Boston Review on the web, one of the most exciting projects I have been involved in.

UPDATE May 10, 2010
The new site will be on OpenPublish! I already have some OpenPublish test sites up and have one configured to search with a separate Apache Solr server and sort the results flexibly. Now I am converting my code which parses an entire issue of Boston Review and imports it to work with OpenPublish. I will update this article with progress.

UPDATE June 2, 2010
Boston Review staffers are playing with a draft of the new OpenPublish-based site that auto-imports content from the most recent three issues. Even with just the default OpenPublish theme the new site is a beauty!