Deaniacs For Edwards
In the fast-paced world of politics everything needs to be done yesterday, but nothing will be known for sure until tomorrow. In the 2004 Democratic Party presidential nomination race, things were no different. We were contacted a few days after Dr. Howard Dean stopped actively campaigning by some of his staff who were organizing Dean supporters to switch to Senator John Edwards. There were a lot of people interested in such as site, but we had less than a week to get it done.
They had purchased a domain, deaniacsforedwards.com, but needed a website, and needed it fast. The clock was ticking; this was Wednesday and the site had to be operational by Saturday in time for a national press release on Sunday. The New York Times doesn't wait for anybody.
Big tools in no time...
After a few meetings with the core people organizing the effort it was decided that I would be sent a design comp and the site would be built based on that. The site needed to have an events calender, blog, forums, user comments, an email postcard sending function, as well as administrative tools to allow fast and frequent content updates by a variety of people with varied skill levels. We would get the design comps on Thursday, have the site up on Friday, and have Saturday to review and make changes before launching the site on Saturday night in time for the papers on Sunday morning.
Um, thats crazy...
Yes, it is. Fortunately we have tools that allow us to do most of what was required 'out of the box'. An application called DeanSpace has been developed based on a well known content management system called Drupal that was used on many of Dr. Dean's websites across the country. This web application is open-source, which means that anyone can use it free of charge. Also, the source code is available for anyone to modify and change, so it enables us to make the necessary changes to tailor it to each site's needs. This site required a new theme module, and modifications to several of the core modules to make it exactly the way it needed to be for the launch.
The results...
The founder of the site, Eric Schmeltzer (Deputy State Director of Dr. Dean's New York campaign), offered to be a reference for us in the future so we'll take him up on his offer and show you what he had to say in one of the emails right before the launch:
Dude, again, you're amazing. Please remember to call me to write you a letter of recommendation and list me as a reference. I'm dead serious. I will need to know, though, do we think we're ready to rock at midnight? I need to call reporters and it's time to say we're a go or not a go. I think we're a go, but you tell me.
We were a go.
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