How to build a simple multi-contributor news site

Hi James!
(This post is a reply to a question on how to build a simple multi-contributor news site, but I felt better posting thiswriteup as a new node.)

I did something like the thing you ask for a few months ago, when doing some hands-on web stuff with Swedish journalist students.
It would take some time and effort to explain everything I did in detail, but you could try the following list and ask more questions if you get stuck.
You can see the results at Alfatidningen.se and Betatidningen.se.
(Please remember that this is the result of limited working time. You can probably achieve something a few steps better than this if you put enough efforts into it, but you won't get a full-fledged newspaper site.)

This is what I did, basically:

Installation and modules

* Basic installation and configuration (such as time zones, language and site information).
* Installation of modules for nice URLs: Global Redirect, Search 404, Pathauto and Token.
* Some modules for statistics monitoring and promotion at search engines: Google Analytics, XML Sitemap (which requires Module weight in order to work properly with Pathauto).
* Modules for modifying content types to accept images and links to external web sites: CCK, Link, Image field. You might also consider Media field if you want to upload audio or video clips.
Note: CCK might sound frightening to newbies, but it's really rather straight forward. And it's really really worth it. Search Youtube for some tutorials if you feel uncertain.
* Installation of Formfilter module to spare writers of unnesseccary fields (such as log fields) when writing stories.

Some configuration

* Fixing the "news story" node type via CCK: changing name of "story" node type, adding image field (perhaps multiple), adding link field (definately multiple), activating Formfilter for selected fields.
* Adjusting Upload settings to allow relevant files and file sizes.
* Creation of category taxonomy "News categories" and adding relevant basic terms (in my case "environment", "economy" and "crimes").
* Configuring decent path templates for Pathauto (in my case example.com/news/title-of-story, but adding a date in the URL is probably wise).

Theming

I'm not much into theming (yet), and it wasn't the scoop of the course I gave, so I just picked a theme from Themegarden. The most newspapery I found was probably Blue Zinfandel (though I had some problems with displaying images neatly).
* I changed some basic stuff in the theme, such as logos, a little font tweaking and so.
* Don't forget to set a separate admin theme, or you'll go crazy sooner or later.

Users and roles

* Creation of three user roles: super admin, admin and writer. (Admin was for writers who want to be able to, for example, moderate comments.)
* Assigning of relevant permissions in the user permissions table.
* Since I was working with a well-defined pool of students, I could add all the users at this point (and then turn off the possibility for new users to register).

Some interface

* Creation of some information pages - about the paper, etc.
* Creation and enabling of a menu block for anonymous visitors - links to the information pages, to latest news in different categories, etc.
* Creation of a menu block where Admins find links to modify menus, watch latest comments, etc. (Make sure to enable this only for the Admin role.)
* Hiding the standard navigation menu block for anyone but Super admin users.
* Creation of a block with some standard HTML formatting help, and enabling these only on node/add pages.
* Activation of Contact module.

Bringing it online

* Submitting sitemaps to search engines.
* Activating Google analytics.
* Bringing the site online.

Afterwards

After some discussions with the students, we did the following additions:
* Adding the Panels module to create a tailored front page.
* Adding the Views module to create tailored blocks and pages to put in the panels.
* Adding Image Cache module to create tailored image sizes.

//Johan Falk, Sweden