Drupal developers needed to democratize magazine publishing | The Bakersfield Californian

PLEASE RESPOND TO jobs@printcasting.com

The Bakersfield Californian is looking for experienced Drupal
developers for an exciting new social media project. Using funds from
a Knight News Challenge project, we're going to make it possible for
anyone to be their own local media mogul. Sound interesting? Read on
for details!

WHO ARE WE?
The Californian is an independent, family-owned newspaper in central
California that has a reputation for innovation. We're leaders in our
industry in applying "Web 2.0" concepts locally, and among the first
newspapers in the United States to adopt social networking and citizen
journalism as part of our core offerings.

We focus not just on our newspaper, but on growing local audiences
through 11 niche-focused local brands. All of them have participatory
Web sites, and 6 also have print magazines or newspapers that feature
users' content. We are the leaders in our industry when it come to
delivery fresh ideas which others are eager to adopt, and have been
covered widely, including in a front page story on The Wall Street
Journal.

WHAT'S THE PROJECT?
As one of 16 winners of the 2008 Knight News Challenge, we have the
support of Knight Foundation (http://www.knightfoundation.org) to
develop a revolutionary set of tools that will allow anyone to create
a local newspaper, magazine or newsletter by mixing their own content
with content from participating local blogs and news providers. Normal
people will be able to publish printable content without the need for
money, technical skills or design skills. The end result will be
hundreds of magazines which are also full of local ads that were
submitted using self-serve tools.

WHAT'S THE KNIGHT NEWS CHALLENGE?
The 2008 Knight News Challenge is the second stage of a 5-year program
to award at least $20 million for innovative ideas using digital
experiments to transform community news. Since its creation in 1950,
Knight Foundation has invested nearly $315 million to advance
journalism quality and freedom of expression. Learn more at http://newschallenge.org

WHY DRUPAL?
Under the terms of our Knight Foundation grant, we're developing these
tools under an open-source license in order to start a new movement
around print.

What better place to look than the Drupal community? We want top
developers to provide their knowledge and expertise to this project.
We know that the Drupal community can develop a realiable, feature-
rich application that can then be used by thousands of other Drupal
sites.

Our project requires multiple skillsets. Please review our needs
below, and let us know if you can contribute.

• Drupal - Ability to create modules correctly within the Drupal
  framework

• PDF Generation - PDF generation with advance layouts and
  functionality. Do you have ideas on how to generate PDFs within PHP?
  We want to talk to you!

• RSS/Atom - Key content is derived from RSS and Atom feeds. Knowledge
  of these standards and how they can be used is invaluable.

• MySQL - You should know how to effectively design a scalable
  database which will work well with Drupal.

• UI (Javascript/Ajax/DHTML) - TWe'll need a rich interface to control
  content. Anyone who likes a challenge needs to work with us.

PLEASE RESPOND TO jobs@printcasting.com