Yes, yes. Everyone’s all excited about Portland playing host to Leverage—well, okay, not everyone but you know what I mean. And, as such, there’s all of this talk about PDX becoming little Hollywood or Trolleywood or Hippiewood or whatever.

But that’s just one small segment of the Hollywood experience. Anyone who knows Hollywood knows that the real pomp and circumstance takes place on the venerable red carpet. That’s right, my friend. Awards shows. That’s where it’s at.

And guess what? Portland’s got a part of that, too. No, I’m serious. Portland-based Metal Toad Media is the magic behind emmys.com.

I sat down with Joaquin Lippincott and Sam Laroe to talk about their work with the Emmy folks and, basically, why Drupal?

“They’re really pushing to get away from the brochureware,” said Joaquin. “They’d like to see the site as something that gets used all year long.”

And Metal Toad has been working hard to get them there. By incorporating video, adding Twitter streams, and pulling together some Drupal magic to make the sites more interactive.

Why Drupal? Well for one thing, Metal Toad is a Drupal shop. And both Joaquin and Sam were quick to laud the extensibility of the platform and the strength of the Drupal community. And then of course there’s the big factor: Drupal was specified in the RFP for the project.

Which is seeming to become more common place for the open source content management system. Drupal is making more and more appearances as the CMS for mainstream sites, Fast Company, Sony BMG—as in “Yo Drupal, I’m really happy for you and I’m gonna let you finish but Beyonce has the best Website ever”—and recovery.gov among them.

So it should really come as no surprise that Drupal is getting the call to handle projects like the Emmys site. And with the burgeoning Portland Drupal community, it should come as no surprise that we’ve got folks here working on it.

But the real test comes this Sunday. When hundreds of thousands of users descend upon the site to figure out if HBO won all of the awards or just most of them.

As for you—you award show addict you—just bear in mind that while you’re sitting there watching those TV stars accept statuettes on Sunday, some Portland folks will be babysitting the servers that are running the Emmys site—and helping the Emmys staff keep the up-to-date as quickly as possible. And if they pull that off, that’s an award in and of itself.

In fact, we might need to get a little red carpet of our own.

For more information on the company behind the site, visit Metal Toad. Or to revel in the pomp and circumstance, visit emmys.com.

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