What does Tree House do and how do you work with Drupal?

Tree House Agency does custom development and theming of large, high-traffic websites; the largest portion of our portfolio lies in the media space. Drupal is our platform of choice for most of these projects, due to its incredible flexibility and suitability for sites with complex content and user interaction requirements.

Two particular areas of specialization for us are scaling Drupal for high-volume site traffic, and custom theming.  With regard to scaling, we have found that Drupal offers a wide variety of tools for optimization, as well as the ability to make more advanced performance enhancements when needed.  Drupal’s theming system allows a very high degree of customization without interfering with the functional code of Drupal core and contributed modules.

How did you first get involved in Drupal development?

Believe it or not, our first involvement with Drupal was working on what was at the time one of the largest Drupal sites – myLifetime.com.  Coming mainly from a front-end and multimedia specialty, we naturally graviated towards theming and quickly became one of the few shops that could do it to meet the highly customized requirements of our enterprise-level media clients.  

Since then we have evolved our team and Drupal-related services to include high-end development and archtiecture, as well as scaling and optimization best practices.  We’ve found that for the majority of our clients, Drupal is an excellent fit for their content and community management needs.

What type of websites do you specialize in?

The majority of our sites are high-traffic with large amounts of interrelated content, and often include community elements ranging from visitor account and profiles to full on social networks.  Most of our work lies in the media space, with organizations including Lifetime Television, SonyBMG, Mansueto Ventures, and WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive. 

What are you most looking forward to at DrupalCon DC?

We are excited about lots of stuff this year.  We have watched Drupal and its events grow since we first came on the scene, and it’s simply incredible.  We are excited to be a Gold sponsor this year and also be presenting two sessions.  Along with our own presentations, there are so many other fantastic sessions this year that we can’t wait to check out. We are bringing almost the entire company so we can cover a lot of ground and absorb as much information as possible!  

Also, something we always look forward to at DrupalCon is just hanging out with our friends in the community.  Our approach is generally to let loose and have fun at conferences, and this one should really be a blast.  We are a tech-focused shop, but love to flex our creative muscles when we can…we came up with a kind of crazy swag idea this year that we hope will be fun for everybody!