Newspapers on Drupal

DrupalCON Boston promises to be the biggest and (of course) the best DrupalCON ever. How do I know? Well, I'm helping organize part of the "Site Building" track of the conference. I'm also organizing and hosting the first ever News Industry meetup. Do you plan to attend?

There will also be a first-ever Job Fair at this DrupalCON. Sponsoring organizations can come recruit talent at the Job Fair.

Can anybody suggest what the best site search technique might be best for a 30,000+ article site?

We tried using the Drupal search module (indexing words, posts and users in our site's content) about 12 months or so ago. But we had problems, principally due to CCK fields from what I can remember, and so we jettisoned it in favour of Google Custom search.

Google is okay, but we'd like something more customised than they allow.

We currently run 4.7, but are looking to upgrade soon.

Any advice gratefully received.

• Geoff

Greetings,

We (rue89.com) are giving a 2-days seminar to 15 african journalist/web project managers.
As the technical manage, I will give a presentation of drupal and why is it good for newspaper. We have used Drupal for 3 newspaper related website, so I am starting to know why drupal is good for that use. As an engineer I also know that I like Drupal for its technical qualities (think modularity, quality of code, performances; extensibility, ...).

Hello all,

I wanted to introduce myself, and our now-powered-by-Drupal sites, PilotOnline.com and HamptonRoads.com. I'm Jeff Anderson, and I work as the product development manager for the interactive division of The Virginian-Pilot newspaper based in Norfolk, Virginia. The Pilot is a top 50/60 U.S. daily newspaper by circulation size, and PilotOnline.com was one of the first newspaper websites to go online in the early 1990s. Along with its sister site HamptonRoads.com, a local portal focused on entertainment, community and local guides, we recently ranked No. 6 in the U.S. in terms of the percentage of users in a local market who use a particular locally-focused site. On December 10, we re-launched both sites on a customized Drupal 5.x platform.

If you were to ask Santa Claus to bring you something to help your news site building/integration projects this year, what would you ask for?

Some examples: NITF import? NewsML import? Proprietary import from (fill in the blank legacy newsroom CMS)? Quark integration? InDesign integration? Web-to-print classifieds? Facebook tools? Javascript "badges?"

What would position Drupal as a more effective tool for you to improve your website, cut costs, connect with a larger audience, provide more effective community services, et cetera?

Post your answers below.

While Drupal already has many of the tools necessary to implement social networking techniques on a community site, I haven't found anything that works like the personalized central "News Feed" system in Facebook or Twitter.

I'm curious whether anyone has done any development work, planning or merely thinking about how this might be done in Drupal, and about the implications.

I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on whether Drupal will ultimately buckle under the weight of too many modules.

I turn to this forum because, as newspaper sites wanting to entice readers and enhance their experience with all sorts of 'bells and whistles', we are more likely to want to add a lot more modules than a lot of other websites.

But, we're wondering how adding more and more modules will affect future performance and whether Drupal will ultimately be able to handle it.

This post is just a way to attach a screen shot from the site wildlifewatch.in

//Johan, Sweden

This seemed the most appropriate forum; so I am posting my query here.

I want to know whether someone has some kind of formula to evaluate the value of a news website? I site I have in mind is not a generic news site, but a b2b news site.

Depending on current unique users, potential users, current revenue, potential revenue, site size, site architecture, etc.

Whatever I have seen so far on the Web is all ad hoc. There doesn't seem to be any vague formula even anywhere. Does anyone have any idea about existing benchmarks?

Some parameters can be quantified, while some can't be.