If you’re even thinking about using Drupal to power any sort of news or community site, check out this explanation from Jeff Anderson, the product development manager for PilotOnline.com and HamptonRoads.com in Virginia.
(Sidenote: If you’ve never visited those sites, or HamptonRoads.tv, or looked at what the Pilot does in print, you’re seriously missing out on some innovative work – with style.)
Anderson goes over the development process, challenges, and solutions to migrating two 24/7 local news sites with full databases of stories, comments, and users from home-brewed code to fully built-out Drupal-powered beasts.
A sample, on the topic of how to deal with swarms of one-time visitors coming from the Drudges, Farks, and Diggs of the world:
“Since those events bring us a crush of out-of-market, unlogged users, the Boost module lets us serve those users flat pages – which we expire on a frequent interval – and save the database and application servers to provide dynamic content to authenticated users.”
Go read the whole thing.
Obvious bonus link: The Newspapers on Drupal group.
Ryan Sholin 
This is impressive news for Drupalites.
Is this the largest newspaper site(s) to launch in Drupal?
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I think it’s the largest circulation newspaper (so far) to have used Drupal as the core online publishing platform. There are some larger papers using Drupal for smaller projects.
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Wish I’d found something like that nine months ago. My main Dalian project (DalianDalian.com) is built on Drupal and it’s been a great platform. Must pass that on to the guy doing all the coding.
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All,
Thanks for the above comments. We have been receiving mixed results from our local community. This was the first Drupal project our team had ever worked on. All of were ColdFusion Developers before switching to Drupal.
Regards,
Jordan
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