How to set up a newspaper site
I work for a newspaper publisher that produces 9 weekly newspapers. I'm looking into using Drupal as a CMS for our web products. I read Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 which helped me to understand how drupal works and to set up a site. I really like how the New York Observer is laid out and could use some help on setting up a newspaper site.
Below is a list of what I'd like to do and would really appreciate any pointers or suggestion you may have.
• How to implement different templates on different sections of the site. (ie. home page, sports, lifestyle, etc.) Home page would display new stories from the whole site. Sports or an other section would display the newest stories for that section.
• How to create our own styled templates for story page.
• How to set up ad space on the site.
Thanks in advance.
Community Newspapers
Jay:
I'm using 5.7 to do what you want. We run about 10 community newspapers (weeklies and dailies) and about 30 other sites on two drupal multi-site installs (two different Linux servers). You can see one at hutchinsonleader.com.
You can use different templates with an implementation of pathauto and some template.php code, and that should take care of questions one and two. Read about that here: http://drupal.org/node/154149. We use the system but haven't yet taken full advantage of it.
Also, you'll use the views module to create pages and blocks based on specific content. Very powerful.
We use OpenX ad server (formerly OpenAds; it's open-source, too) and it works quite well. There's a module for that software, and it's been recently updated. You can see the module in the modules section.
Feel free to email or call with other questions.
Steve
Thanks Steve
Thanks for all your help. I'm having trouble getting that code snippet to work. I'm getting an error in the php log: PHP Fatal error: Cannot redeclare _phptemplate_variables() (previously declared
If I remove the _ before phptemplate, the is no error but the script isn't working.
Any thoughts?
There can be only one ....
There can be only one declaration of the function in your template.php file. If you already have such a function, you need the merge the two into one, which isn't particularly hard but does require some basic understanding of PHP.
You are right
It was already declared. I replaced it with the new code and everything is working great.
Having trouble getting a javascript to work
I'm converting current HTML templates to Drupal and am having trouble getting the javascripts to work in Drupal. They are just some basic scriptaculous scripts that work fine on the non-drupal pages. I've added the scripts into the head:
<script src="javascripts/scriptaculous.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>but when I click the link to initiate the effect, nothing happens. In Firefox using firebug, I get an error message: effect not defined.How can I get the scripts to work in Drupal.