Austin Smith is a founder and partner of Alley Interactive, a software development firm in New York City which specializes in high traffic sites for news media, entertainment, and higher education. Alley Interactive was founded by ex-employees of The New York Observer, which converted to WordPress in June of 2011 after four years of running Drupal. Austin learned to use WordPress in early 2011 and launched Betabeat.com and PolitickerNY.com for The Observer, and then led the Observer.com rebuild project, which involved migrating 100,000 articles from Drupal, implementing a complex cross-site syndication system, battling chronic performance problems on the database server, and culling plugins which were causing issues.
Austin will be presenting “From Drupal to WordPress: Migrating the New York Observer” on Friday.