Ben Welsh, our database guru, built the app in a couple weeks using Django, which has the nice benefit of dynamically generating an admin interface for whatever schema you define. This made it possible to easily distribute the data entry across the metro staff, so that reporters who had written obits were able to input the particulars of the people they reported on.

The admin interface was set up on an internal server ahead of time, and while reporters and editors were working on the content, we were designing the templates and building the app.

Because we hadn’t used this production setup (a beta Django GridContainer from Media Temple) before, we were a little nervous about how it would scale, but from what I could tell, the server handled the Memorial Day traffic (~100,000 pageviews to the database) without breaking a sweat.

(Ben’s also got a nice write-up on his blog.)

Thanks for pointing this out. Could you tell us a little more about what went into this on the back end? Is this a native database function within your CMS? If not, did you have this developed from scratch, or does it use some commonly available tools?