Newbie question about site development ... why recreate the wheel?

You could try this solution, http://www.prosepoint.org, which is free.

But I think most news editors would not be really satisfied with it. You will spend a lot of time modifying it to suit your own site, then realize that you should have just built something from the base Drupal installation. But you may as well check it out, it might be a good solution for you.

"We all know there are best practises that could be repeated from site to site." - we all think that the requirements for newspaper-type sites are the same, until you actually get around to building one. :-)

I agree with Julien. I don't understand how the backend is 3x higher than the design, and how they give you a quote without being explicit about the costs.

A good custom design can be pricey, but what all are these "back end" costs? Just installing and setting up Drupal? If you have someone with some basic web experience, I highly suggest having them do the installation and setup, so that you have someone on staff whose familiar with the ins and outs. Installation is simple (I have no formal IT training, and have done dozens of installs and they keep getting easier).

You have decided on the features, specifications, etc., then I would reach out to a design team if you don't have someone on staff.

As for your question about developer templates .... There are some lists on Drupal (http://groups.drupal.org/node/5281) that provide a rough guide to what you can use.

First, I would be very wary of companies that offer a flat fee without first analyzing the details. That said, you may be to blame for asking a question like "how much does it cost to build a newspaper site". How much does a car or a house cost?

Be prepared to do a LOT of work. The more detailed and organized about your project specs you are, the happier you are going to be with the result. It will help companies bidding on the project to give you a more accurate estimate of time and costs. You also send a message to them that you know what you want, that you have done your homework.

As a developer, what I ask a client to do is give me a shopping list of the features they want along with priority levels. Some items may be out of your budget, and you may want to start with a Phase 1 launch and add other features as you can afford them.

Unless you are asking for something that functions radically different from other sites, I don't see any reason why the back-end should cost so much.

On Design: You have someone in-house that does your graphics and layouts, right? Most Developers I know really appreciate when a client has screenshots of what they want. If you have the in-house talent, there is nothing stopping you from doing a mock-up, page by page, feature by feature of what you want the site to look like. Include things like font info and spacing so they can be easily re-created in CSS during the theming process. Another benefit of working with your own designers is that you have an established working relationship and already know how to communicate ideas with each other.

If you have someone in house that is capable of setting up a basic Drupal site, Open Publish may be a good starting point for you. http://drupal.org/project/openpublish

Best of luck!

Antonio

The reason you get wildly varying estimates about cost and time is a lack of definition of scope and requirements.

"A solution for a small market daily, weekly or magazine" wouldn't tell me whether you need to integrate with an existing newsroom CMS, handle wire feeds, etc. You might be thinking of an edition-driven model (which I think is a fundamental error) or you might be thinking of creating a community portal with social networking features. What about photos? Video?

We have small-market dailies in our company that do great work with video and all of our newspapers have very strong efforts in community photo-sharing, but your expectations might differ.

We looked at OpenPublish, and I would agree that downloading it is a good place to start -- but I would not base a site on it. Instead, I'd open it up and learn how it was built, and adapt the parts that made the most sense. It probably does around one-tenth of what our internally developed Drupal platform attempts, but it's a great demo of how to integrate Calais for classification and organization of data.

Everybody wants a custom design, but most do have common requirements and it should be possible to start with a free theme. Unfortunately the basic needs are just not met by the open-source Drupal themes.

I had hoped that we would be able to evolve and release a base theme that would serve the needs of most newspaper sites, particularly with regard to adherence to standard advertising unit placement. However, our own skinnable base theme, as it now stands, is far too entangled with assumptions about our use of specific in-house modules and configuration oddities. It's not something we can release. I can't even port it to a standard Drupal install.

I'm also not confident that we will be able to distribute any sort of an install profile at any time soon. It may be that the Features module proves to be a good tool for exporting some of our very complex configuration work into a form that can be passed around.

Our first priority has to be relaunching SavannahNow.com, then BlufftonToday.com, StAugustine.com, BrainerdDispatch.com, Augusta.com and five other newspaper sites in Georgia, Texas and Alaska. So at this point we're just releasing pieces such as the Context Ad Serving and Analytics module.

I would love to be able to turn a existing drupal installation into openpublish.

I currently have about 15000 nodes so but would like to use the Openpublish distro.

Theres no way to do that, is there?

I'm building a news site using the OpenPublish installation profile. First, I'm very new to this (CSS, HTML, PHP, MySql, ect.) . For efficiency, I'm on a need to know bases. If I need to know something then I go figure it out. What OpenPublish gives me is a framework to start with, something that works and approaches what I need so that I can take it apart to see how it works. The basic layout and design of the site I'm making is still OpenPublish with my own little tweaks.

I would like to see a group of people OpenPublish and add to it. The newspaper site I'm making uses these modules, Dynamic Display Block for the front page news rotator, Workflow which I have set up according to the lullibot Using Drupal book -- authors can only send an article to review which triggers and email to the editor -- Dynamic Menus, Dashboard and Advanced Profiles with links to the create article pages so users with author permissions do not ever have to see the admin menu and a mini dashboard for the authors. I've done a lot of other things with it too -- praying it's all going to work together. There are a lot of little tweaks, for example, this morning I rewrote the OpenPublish PHP snippet for the login destination to redirect the author and all authenticated users to their profile.

If I had the time I would turn around and create and installation profile with all these cool mods turned off. If people wanted to add them, rather than sweat it out like I have been they can just enable the module, maybe follow some minor instructions and bam, a front page news rotater.

Of course, sweating it out is the best part of it (it's why I own a '89 Jeep wrangler which I spend more time under then in.) However, I can see how the version of OpenPublish I'm creating might be great in a college journalism classroom! Each user has a dashboard which shows their articles, an about me section, personal information if they care to share, forum posts, and all replies to forums and articles that they have written.

I image all the students submitting their work online to be reviewed by an editor, teacher or even a group of their peers. Then it can be set to be published to the public. With the google ads and openx integration they can even generate ad revenue and some of those funds can be recycled back into the classroom. College students playing football generate massive wads of cash for universities, why can't literature students generate a little profit too?

Yes, the site I'm making is somewhat heavy, but after testing it with firebug's net feature it's a lot faster than my biggest competitor which isn't saying much except all we have to do is be a little faster not perfect.

My big projects this weekend are installing the node import module for the several thousand past articles and the user import module for the 25,000 users. Wish me luck!!

I'm excited to show the site to the Drupal news group. But, your going to have to wait a week or two.

Yes, I'll post it here. I would really like to help start a recipe database for openpublish. Step - by - step instructions so a noob can put a news rotater on the front page, for example. Topics like using tokens, pathauto, taxonomy and views for organizing articles within the OpenPublish framework really need to be discussed. I really feel like I've been on my own finding the solutions to the problems. The answers are out there. People have taken the time to help others and help themselves but it's so hard sometimes to find them. For example, I finally read webchick's article on calais. All the information on drupal, in the forums, in the issues queue and what she wrote didn't explain the most fundamental property about the system to me. It was after I submitted an article at http://viewer.opencalais.com/ did I understand how it worked.

Unfortunately, my web host migrated everything to a new server and it's all crashing :(. I got to get to work.