Archived: Ye olde Liste of Modulies for newspapers

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It was time to clean up the old list of modules for newspapers. The new list is found on this page.
Here's a copy of the old list, for reference.

This wiki page lists a number of modules useful for newspaper sites. Please add any module you think is missing! A discussion is found at the bottom of the page.
All modules work with Drupal 5 if nothing else is stated. Most descriptions come from the readme or info files (but please add your own comment if it would describe the module better from a newspaper perspective).
Latest addition: Data acquisition section added. "Node grouping" renamed to "Content organization and presentation." Minor edits.

A few tips on choosing modules

  • Make sure that the module fits the Drupal version you're using.
  • Read the readme, to make sure that the module does what you want it to do. Some modules have quite misleading names.
  • Check the feature-request list and bug report list for the module. If they are close to empty, it means that the module is barely used, and probably won't continue to be developed (unless you do it yourself). If the bug list contains serious bugs that haven't been fixed for some time, it means that maintainance of the module is poor.
  • Always try the module on a test site for a while before installing it on your live site.

Must-haves

  • CCK, Content Construction Kit, is used to customize node types. Use with sub modules to create data fields with dates, links, buttons, etc. With CCK, you can create a article node type containing fields for section, lead image, editor, publish end-date, location, et cetera. Also, check out the Contemplate module for extended node template customization. There are a number of sub modules.
  • The Action module allows you to configure actions for use by other Drupal modules. For example, you can create an action that sends an email message to someone. Another Drupal module may then execute that action.
  • Views module allows creation of lists of nodes based on flexible criteria, for example last commented articles, most popular articles, sports articles tagged as top stories. You can choose which fields to display in the lists, and the lists may be themed individually. Also, the lists may be displayed as blocks or pages, and lists can be exported as documents or CSV tables, and may also be broadcasted as RSS feeds. There are a number of sub modules for Views, such as Insert view, which makes it easier to display lists in nodes (for example for read-more links). Other useful extension modules include Views actions links, Views scheduler and Views bonus pack.
  • Panels module will help you to create complex, multi-column page layouts that can be managed by editors. With Panels, it's possible to change the layout of the homepage or section pages based on the needs of news content. Panels allows node, view, block or custom content to be assigned arbitrarily to zones in custom layouts, freeing you from the ordinary limitations of the 1:1 relationship between blocks and regions.
  • The Pathauto module provides support functions for other modules to automatically generate aliases based on appropriate criteria, for example yoursite.com/year/issue/title-of-article. This is a huge boost when it comes to search engine optimization.
  • XML Sitemap to submit and control XML sitemaps, which makes the (right parts of the) site more popular among search engines. If you use XML sitemap and Pathauto, you should increase the weight of XML sitemap to make the paths be written after the aliases have been created. This can be done by editing in the system mySQL table, or through the Module Weight module.

Administration


Customizing user access

  • Premium module restricts access to premium content by role. Useful on a news or magazine site where teasers are available to the general public but the full body is only available to privileged users. Premium nodes appear in listings with full title and teaser available to anyone. If a user does not have adequate privileges, the body is replaced with an administrator-defined message (for example, an invitation to join the site). Only dev version available for Drupal 5.
  • Content access module allows you to manage permissions for content types by role and author. It allows you to specifiy custom view, edit and delete permissions for each content type. Optionally you can also enable per node access settings, so you can customize the access for each node. This module appears to be more maintained than Node Access, and also to better support multiple access managing modules.
  • Node Access module allows you to manage permissions for nodes by role and user. In other words, it implements per node access control for users and groups. With this module, you can restrict access to any individual node without having to use taxonomy. You can assign permission to view, edit or delete each individual node by user or role.
  • Menu per role module allows you to restrict access of menu items per roles. Useful if you want blocks or menu items to show only to selected user groups (be it editors, reporters or privileged users).
  • CCK Field Permissions module allows admins to restrict access to specific CCK node type fields to by user roles. This is useful if you, for example, want full-versions of articles available to premium-users only, but still want all users to see parts of the article.
  • Registration code module allows administrators to set a registration code or codes that new users must enter before they can complete the registration process. Useful for example if you have a printed password in your magazine to allow readers to access content online.
  • Path access provides the means to restrict pages based on their path alias - meaning you can lock out certain user role groups from whole sections of a site using wildcards. Useful mainly to increase security on your site.

Member administration and recruiting

  • Logintoboggan module provides a number of neat functions for logging in and registrating, such as re-typing e-mail for verification.
  • Members module provides an alternate listing style to Profile module, with a focus on tabular display and an emphasis on roles (including listing by role).
  • Account reminder will resend the welcome email to those users who have registered but who have not yet validated their email addresses.
  • Inactive user provides automatic handling of inactive users.
  • nf registration module adds the ability to have several different membership types, each collecting different data from the user for registration by using custom content types and the combination of nodeprofile and pageroute modules.
  • Tellafriend module creates a “tell-a-friend” page to direct traffic towards your site. The Postcard module does a similar job by allowing users to create e-postcards and send a link to their friends.
  • Ecommerce module has some functions concerning payment for registration.

News letters

  • Simplenews sends html or plain text newsletters to the subscription list. It may be extended with the Simplenews template module.
  • The Views Mail module provides a flexible method for sending messages to list of users created by the Views module.

Statistics

  • Download count increments a download counter and logs a descriptive message each time an attached file is downloaded.
  • Google Analytics module adds Google Analytics javascript tracking code to all your site's pages. This could be the best choice for sites where non-tech people would like to see statistics.
  • Quickstats module is a simple and efficient (from a database point of view) way to count pageviews of nodes. It is intended for heavy traffic sites where performance is key.

Content

Data acquisition

  • FeedAPI can create full nodes from Atom and RSS feeds, and can be extended to accommodate other formats. There is not (yet) a publicly available NITF or NewsML parser, and given the general poor technical quality of feeds generated by most legacy newsroom content management systems, you may be better off creating your own that is tuned to the oddities of your feed.
  • Feed Element Mapper is an add-on module for FeedAPI that maps elements on a feed item to CCK fields or taxonomy terms.

Content organization and presentation

  • Node Queue module allows site managers to arbitrarily designate nodes as belonging to a group for some purpose. A typical use case would be to create lists of featured items for the front page or a section highlights page. Node queues are available to Views.
  • Calais integrates the ThompsonReuters OpenCalais content-analysis service. Node content is submitted automatically for analysis and term extraction through a Web services interface. Extracted terms are inserted into a set of specific vocabularies. This can be used for automatic generation of related-item links, etc.
  • Front Page module provides some tools for customizing front page settings, for example to show different front pages for different user roles.
  • Sidecontent module allows content to be added (easily) to a side bar block to a node (and only that node).
  • Node family module allows you to define relations between content types (such as parent articles and child info-boxes).
  • Relativity allows parent-child relationships between nodes to be established, managed and searched. Also a related navigation block.
  • Relatedcontent allows privileged users to assemble teasers at the end of a node.
  • Cre, content recommendation engine, recommends nodes that have recieved high user ratings. (For example by Fivestar, a simple five-star voting widget for nodes. There are more voting modules available. Most of them use the Votingapi module.)

Data output

  • NITF Views extends the Views module to output NITF XML (News Industry Text Format) for moving Drupal data to other news systems.

Customizing node display

  • Tweakbox allows you to apply new teaser settings on all or selected nodes, define teaser length per content type, and also to create tables of content based on heading tags.
  • Nodeteaser module provides a separate teaser field.
  • Paging module allows users to use a tag to break a node up, for specified content types, into multiple pages.
  • Print Friendly Pages module allows you to generate printer friendly versions of any node by navigating to www.example.com/node/nid/print, where nid is the node id of content to render.
  • Pdfview is a module to generate pdf files from nodes.

Content handling

  • Scheduler module allows nodes to be published and unpublished on specified dates. JSCalendar provides a comfortable interface for entering dates.
  • Authorship module enables site admins to alter the “submitted by” field of a node.
  • Reptag (Rep[lacement]Tags) module allows you to define tags (like $MYTAG$ or {DATE}) and replace them with user-defined text, images, code, ... or use RepTag to format your pages with simple markup-style tags.
  • The Comment Mail module allows an e-mail to be sent to the site administrator(s) when new comments are posted. A link in the email allows quick approval, editing, deletion, and/or banning of the poster's IP address (good for spam).
  • Ad module is an advertising system for Drupal powered websites.

Images

  • Image module allows images as node types. It’s the basic image handling module, but there are alternatives.
  • Image assist module allows easier uploading and attaching images to nodes. Good for non-tech people.
  • Image filter allows users to reference images from other nodes. (There are more image filter modules, seemingly doing the same thing.)
  • Imagecache is useful for scaling and cropping images, and also caches the different image versions. This one is quite powerful, particularly if your site depends on images of certain formats.
  • Upload image takes uploaded images and copies them to image nodes.

Rich media content

  • Video provides the ability for users to add video content. To achieve better performance for site, store the video files at third party site and hence share the traffic with other third party sites like YouTube, Google Video, Amazon S3. Only development version can be used with Drupal 5.
  • Audio module allows a user to create a new audio node type. An audio node lets you upload, stream, and download audio files, and uses the getID3 library to read and write ID3 tag information from the audio file. It comes with a handy flash player that can be embeded in your site. Useful for podcasts.

Miscellaneous

  • Global redirect redirects from old url aliases, which is good both for visitors and search engines (since search engines don't like to find the same pages on several url's).
  • Search 404: If an url doesn't exist, Search 404 makes a search using the terms in the path and presents the result to the visitor. If there is only one page hit, Search 404 can optionally take the visitor to that page directly.

  • Service links module enables admins to add links to a number of social bookmarking sites, blog search sites etc. Includes sites are del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, ma.gnolia.com, Newsvine, Furl, Google, Yahoo, Technorati and IceRocket.
  • Usernode tries to make users nodes. It cares for automatic creation and deletion of a node for each user, the so called usernode. See also Node Profile module for a useful complement. (I understand there is quite a debate on whether users should be nodes or not.)
  • User Points provides the ability for users to gain points when they do certain actions, such as posting a node, commenting, voting, inviting friends to the site, etc.
  • Workflow-ng allows one to customize Drupal’s built in workflows in a very flexible way. This includes flexible publishing workflows, creating custom redirections, etc.
  • Localizer module allows changing and customizing language used in Drupal.
  • Contact Link module provides a “contact the author” link for nodes and comments. The link is configurable by node type.
  • Backup module allows you to download a backup of your Drupal DOCUMENT_ROOT and database over the web.
  • Nodeformpopup module provides popup windows and bookmarklets to submit new nodes with ease. Useful to comfortably add online resources (such as contacts, press releases or articles) into a workflow. Use together with Node form template.

Other resources with similar content

Not high-rated modules


To keep the list above as concise as possible, modules that can be replaced, are deemed less useful, or only useful to a very few newspaper sites are put under this header as a separate list.
If you feel that a module should be moved to this list, please put it under this header along with a comment on why it isn't high-rated. (If this list becomes too long, it will turn into a separate wiki page.) You are also welcome to comment on modules in this list - if they should be removed completely or put back in the high-rated list.
  • Peek allows the creation of links that displays nodes to users who normally do not have access to the node. For example useful in newsletters referring to restricted article nodes. (It appears to have some security risks, though.)
  • Less useful because of security issues.

  • Xstatistics is a module meant for extendibility. It offers basic statistics summaries at the moment.
  • This module appears to have stagnated.

  • Image pager allows neat switching among images in a gallery with prev/next links.
    This might be nice if you're doing an image slideshow, but not really a main function for a newspaper site.
  • Remember me module allows users to have persistent sessions via a checkbox on the login form.
  • This feature doesn't seem very useful, since remembering username and passwords are supported in most browsers anyway.

  • The e-publish helps organize a group of nodes into a publication, such as a newspaper, magazine or newsletter.
  • Less useful since the organizing is rather unflexible, and can be more custom-made through views and taxonomy.

Discussions about this page

  • request: can someone pack all this thing into one download with drupal installation profile so that anyone can very easily install everything at once. tia.
    I don't think it's advisable to install all these modules - it would eat too much memory, and double several features. I've added links to the modules instead, to make it easier to install them yourself. //Itangalo

  • This page will soon need some kind of cleanup. Please help moving not high-rated modules to the separate list far down on the page (as well as making positive comments to modules that belong in the high-rated lists).

  • There's some nice stuff in here for creating functionality. The bit I'd really worry about though using Drupal for a newspaper site is performance. Would need a lot of focus on caching.

  • Check out a module I designed for the NY Times called Authenticate (http://drupal.org/project/authenticate). It does plagiarism checking of node content. I know, sounds like it couldn't possibly.. did i mention it was done for the NY Times. Check it out.

Newspapers on Drupal

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