As Palasthotel CEO Benjamin Birkenhake announced on their company blog, the web agency based in Bielefeld and Berlin recently finished the relaunch of the German Rolling Stone Magazine.

The result of their work is, and I’m really not exaggerating, awesome. Not only did Palasthotel give the website a fresh design, they also did great development work behind the scenes:

• 130.000 articles needed to be migrated from Escenic to WordPress. Inspired by Drupal’s “Migrate” module, Palasthotel developed a WordPress migration framework which they’re going to make Open Source.
• The site uses 79 plugins, 69 of which were developed in-house.
• Homepage and landing pages were built with PalastHotel’s plugin Grid.
• Not only is the website responsive but it also uses “responsive images” technology that loads images only on demand and in the right resolution.
• For maximum search speed, Palasthotel developed their own interface plugin for Apache Solr (soon to be published, too).
• In order to simplify collaboration between three editorial teams, Palasthotel built a solution for sharing image galleries between separate WordPress setups.
• The site uses 8 custom post types for artists, concerts, festivals etc. For connecting these post types, Palasthotel developed a “Post Relationships” plugin (which they’re going to publish as well).
• Their new “Postqueue” plugin allows creating hand-picked content lists, just like the “Nodequeue” module in Drupal.
• And as if this list wasn’t impressive enough already, Palasthotel built and integrated Octavius into the site, their own real-time click tracking service.

Shortly after the relaunch, Ben teamed up with our Chief Uptime Officer Markus for a session at WordCamp Cologne where they presented how our teams cooperate to run High Load Websites reliably, with the Rolling Stone Magazine being only one example.

Congratulations to our friends at Palasthotel for a job well done!