This wiki page answers some of the basic questions of how Drupal may be used for powering a newspaper website. The intended audience is newspaper people who have just heard about Drupal, and want to know a bit more about what it is and what you can do with it.
There's a discussion at the bottom of the page. If you're new to Drupal, feel free to add any questions you have there. (If you're not new to Drupal, feel free to answer any questions or to improve this page in any way you find suitable.)
I've included a some questions concerning import/export, heavy data traffic and a bit more. I'd be grateful if anyone with more Drupal-skills could check these. Also - since I'm not a native English-writer, I'd also be happy for language checks. And, of course, anybody is free to change the page in a way they think improves it. //Itangalo
Introduction and contents
If you plan on using Drupal for your newspaper site you are probably interested in either using it to (a) publish articles already printed in your newspaper/magazine, or (b) to manage and write articles to be published in the printed newspaper. The first two sections of this Wiki deal with these two different uses separately.
This wiki page includes/intends to include the following sections:
- What can Drupal do for my print-to-web newspaper site?
- What can Drupal do for my web-to-print newspaper site?
- Can a Drupal website look the way I want my website to look? (Stub only.)
- Drupal compared to other web solutions
- Is it difficult to administer a Drupal site? (To be written.) Some basic answers to how administration can be shared in Drupal, so that (eg) editors have some administration access, while site admins take care of the site-technical stuff.
- What does it mean that Drupal is open source?
- ...
What can Drupal do for my print-to-web newspaper site?
Using Drupal for a print-to-web site is rather straight-forward, since Drupal is kind of built to be a web publishing tool. With Drupal you can, for example:
- Customize what kind of data you wish to have in an article. You can, for example, have not only header-teaser-body, but also newspaper section, editor, issue number, publishing date, links, etc.
- Automatically create article lists according to selected criteria, showing latest sports articles, highest rated article during this week, all articles written by a chosen reporter, or the three latest comments on your newspaper site. These lists may be presented as frontpages in different sections of your site.
- Set end-dates for articles, to unpublish them automatically.
- Allow a group of users to access only some articles or only parts of articles, while another group of users may access more content on your website.
- Use different layout themes on different parts of your website, for example to make your Life style section of your web site look different than the Sports section.
- Automatically display recommended reading to a user, based on how that user rated previously read articles.
- Create RSS-feeds to alert users when new content has been published.
- Allow comments from readers to be published instantly, or after approval.
- Allow editors, reporters and other selected users to add, edit or delete selected types of content, including comments from readers.
- See statistics of how readers navigate your site, and where your readers come from.
- ...and more. If you have a specific question, please add it in the discussion at the bottom of this wiki page.
If you plan on using Drupal as for print-to-web news, you will find Drupal's built-in way of handling authors a bit frustrating. As default, the author is always the creator of the article, which is mostly not the case if it is your web editor who creates all the articles. However, these settings may be changed in several ways.
What can Drupal do for my web-to-print newspaper site?
Drupal, as it is out-of-the-box, is less built for a web-to-print site. However, with proper customization Drupal can be a powerful tool for managing and writing articles to print. you can, for example:
- Create lists of events you wish your newspaper to keep an eye on. Items may contain customized information fields, such as dates, location (with maps), photo needed (y/n), priority, newspaper section(s), etc.
- Allow selected users to promote events to to-be articles, also with customized information fields (such as assigned reporter(s) or status of article).
- Create and customize other workflows, specifying automated actions to be performed at each promotion (and also who should be allowed to promote items). This could for example be used for promoting written articles into "in print edition".
- Let reporters use a WYSIWYG editor to write and edit their articles online, from any Internet connection. (You can of course also simply copy-paste from an off-line word processor.)
- Create and share an address book containg press relation staff or other people your newspaper might want to contact again. These contacts may also be linked to reporter jobs.
- ... and more. If you have a specific question, please add it in the discussion at the bottom of this wiki page.
Web-to-print export to InDesign and Quark
Currently there is no easy out-of-the-box solution available for export to a DTP system. Some people have made their own modules (often dependent on their specific workflow), others have used the "print friendly" export and so on. There has been some discussion concerning this issue on the Newspapers on Drupal group and the most promising avenue seems to be Views-to-XML export. This is a feature that is being worked on by the Views developers. This in itself is enough for a working web-to-print export to InDesign, which is very flexible in how it handles XML. Once that feature is implemented, it shouldn't be hard to develop a module that provides more control over the export, to a format that is readable by Quark, to NITF or NewsML, or even provide automatic exports so that the XML is always up to date. Once that functionality is provided (most likely not before the end of 2007) Drupal will be an excellent content management system that can replace expensive workflow solutions for smaller newspapers.
(If you wish to read more about this, this node and this node are good places to start.)
Can a Drupal website look the way I want my website to look?
The quick answer to this is: yes. If you have a website built on HTML and CSS, odds are that your site can be used more or less right off as a template for Drupal. If you want to have a look at what newspaper sites running on Drupal may look like, visit Media sites using Drupal for a number of links.
To be re-written and extended.
Drupal compared to other solutions
This page is at drupal.org, so obviously you shouldn't trust it to deliver a non-biased review of Drupal compared to other solutions for running newspaper sites. Still, people at this Drupal-group are probably the best to tell you what's good about Drupal.
Some other CMS's (content management systems) you might want to consider for running your newspaper site are Joomla (that sprung out of Mambo), DotNetNuke, WordPress, TYPO3 and Django.
Two good places to compare CMS's are OpenSourceCMS and CMSMatrix.
This being said, here's a list of things that Drupal is better at than the average CMS:
- Drupal is reliable. Drupal is used by companies such as Yahoo, IBM, MTV and NASA. The core functions of Drupal are well-maintained, as are many of the add-ons. Compared to other CMS's, Drupal has very clean code, and programmers tend to like working with Drupal.
- Drupal is extendible and flexible. There are hundreds of modules available (for free) that extends Drupal's functions, and new ones are being developed all the time. When you lack a certain function, odds are that you have just haven't found the module you need. If indeed that function is missing, it can be developed.
- Drupal has an active support forum. If you're planning on using Drupal for a professional newspaper or magazine, you should probably have a Drupal programmer or developer tied to your organization. This developer will have a great resource in the support and development forums at drupal.org, which will be beneficial for your newspaper, the developer, and for drupal.org. For newspapers without a developer, the support forum is still a great resource, and Drupal (obviously) even has a group for people particularly interested in newspapers.
- Drupal allows customized access control. If your site will need different permissions for different groups of users, you have a good reason for choosing Drupal. Drupal has built-in functions for access control, and add-ons to provide granular control over both administration permissions and access to content on your website.
- Drupal has good web 2.0 functions. Drupal is built for creating communities. If one of the goals with your website is for users participate actively, you will find a lot of posibilities in Drupal. Easy-installed modules range from rating or adding tags to describe articles to creating discussion groups and full-scale web communities.
- Drupal software is free. Investing thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundereds of thousand of dollars in newspaper software tools may be a good idea, if it guarantees good software and support. But with Drupal, you will get all or most software for free, and you have more resources to put in development and support -- most likely while you're getting just as good or even better software. Also, Apache and MySQL, which are the platforms which Drupal usually runs on, are also free and widely used.
- ...
To be honest, there may also be some disadvantages with Drupal.
- Since Drupal is growing fast, it may sometimes be difficult finding developers who can take on jobs straight away. Thus, a bit of planning and having a developer tied to your organization is advisable.
- With all the possibilities for exciting and easily-installed modules, Drupal may turn slow on sites with heavy traffic. Thus, if you have a newspaper site with heavy traffic (like how many visits per day?), you should put extra care into performance optimization. (This is true for any CMS.) However, Drupal has built-in capabilities for advanced caching, and this can be extended to manage even extremely heavy traffic.
- ...
A different approach is to find situations where you shouldn't use Drupal. Here are a few:
- You've found another CMS that has exactly the functions you are looking for. Congratulations! Avoiding customizing the CMS functions will save you a lot of work. Just make sure you're not getting stuck in a CMS that is difficult or very expensive to develop further. (And please write a line here in the forum to tell us what CMS you chose, and why!)
- You really don't need all the functions in Drupal. If you are looking for a way to build a more or less static website, Drupal probably isn't what you're looking for (though it can do that too). However, you shouldn't expect that you should use all the things available to Drupal -- just find the things that suit you needs.
- Your developers are more familiar with another CMS or programming language. It may be a good idea to stick with things that are familiar, but it might also be a short-term gain causing a long-term loss. Have a close look at your CMS options before ruling out those that cost a bit to switch to.
- ...
Is it difficult to administer a Drupal site?
Well, no. Developers comparing different CMS's tend to say that Drupal allows easy content administration interface to hand off to their clients.
To be re-written and extended.
What does it mean that Drupal is open source?
Technically, open source means that when you get a piece of software you are also entitled to go into its program (source) code and learn from it, fiddle with it and pass on a new version of the program. However, as a newspaper publisher, you are probably more interested in some of the practical consequences of Drupal being open source:
- You are not locked-in. Since anyone is entitled to develop Drupal and its add-ons, you are not tied to one single service provider. Also, the open documentation of how your site data is stored ensures that you migrate to some other web tools later on, without the risk of being stuck with one data format only. It is also easier to develop add-on applications, for example to import or export articles from/to tools specific for your newspaper.
- Security issues are fixed quicker. It has been repeatedly shown that security patches are launched quicker for large open-source projects than for proprietary (closed-source) programs.
- Most software is free. Open source does not necessarily mean that it is free, but this is true 99 percent of the time. This means that your technicians may try new things without having to pay first, and you are left with more money for development and maintainance.
- ...
Distributions to build a Drupal powered newspaper site
Discussion: About this page
* Nice summary of export to InDesign and Quark, whoever did it!
Discussion: Questions
* What about importing articles and images from Quark Xpress or InDesign? That's a pretty important thing if you want to use Drupal for print-to-web. (Maybe the Leech module or the Import / Export API?)
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Would it be sensible to use Drupal as an image bank for a newspaper? I suppose it would be possible, but would the data traffic jam everything else up? And does anyone know what kind of functions newspapers usually have in image banks, and if Drupal can match them?
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Should more CMS's be added to the list of possible/plausible solutions for running newspaper/magazine sites?
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At what visit rate does performance optimization become an important issue with Drupal? Is this problem more or less pronounced in Drupal than in other CMS's suitable for newspapers?