Posted by Itangalo on September 9, 2008 at 9:49am
I just found the Innovation News Installation Profile and wanted to post it here on the Newspaper Group. (I know the issue of newspaper installation profiles has been discussed more than once here, and maybe someone would like to know about it.)
I haven't tried it yet, but will have a closer look when I get time.
Cheers!
//Johan Falk, Sweden
PS: I also sent an invitation to the project manager, Open Publishing Lab at RIT, since I couln't find them in the members list in this group - so there's no need for doing that again.
Comments
first thoughts
The preset views and content types are probably handy, but I have my doubts about the usefulness of the Innovation News modules. You can specify editions with a simple taxonomy and display news by publish status with views/workflow and if needed actions so I'm not really inclined to use a special-purpose module to do that.
The possibility to do XML exports is nice, but I've looked at the code and the fields that it exports are pretty much hardcoded. I'd have loved a solution based on Views Datasource or at least similar in philosophy, although I guess you can't create an install profile based on a module that doesn't work yet :) It also requires you to do manual exports, while automatic exports to a predefined location that get updated on each article save would be way more useful for the DTP'ers of a newspaper.
Greetings
Thanks for the invite! It's great to see that there is some interest in Innovation News.
As stdbrouw mentions, there is always more than one way to accomplish a task. We did consider using taxonomy to manage the editions, but wanted more flexibility. Rather than writing a tool which modified the taxonomy system, we wrote an edition manager which was completely independent of Drupal's taxonomy system.
Innovation News aims to be a complete solution for anyone trying to set up their own cross-media newspaper. We at the Open Publishing Lab are specifically concerned with developing for users who are new to publishing. As such, we tried to make everything as straightforward as possible. So while it may not solve every problem (custom XML fields, etc) it does allow a printing enthusiast to easily set up a website with everything they need to run their own web-based newspaper. And of course, thanks to the modularity of Drupal anyone is able to tweak and tailor the system to his or her own specific needs should that be desired.
Being open-source, Innovation News is truly software "of the people, for the people, and by the people". We are always interested to hear from the community and we always try to incorporate as many feature requests as possible into our software. So thank you for starting the discussion. We will be sure to participate as it continues.
just deployed inews
i just deployed it and we are going to use it for the american observer grad student publication at american university.
http://inews6.americanobserver.net
we're already tweaking it, adding multimedia functions. about to delve into deploying tinymce.
will keep in touch and report back on how it goes.
daj
if everyone is thinking alike, chances are no one is thinking.
www.davidandrewjohnson.com
if everyone is thinking alike, chances are no one is thinking.
www.davidandrewjohnson.com
Great!
It's great to see that our software was able to provide you and the University with the features you need to run your publication. I see that you have made some changes to the setup, which is also quite exciting. We at the Open Publishing Lab are very passionate about Open Source software, and are glad to see that end users like yourself are taking advantage of the flexibility that it allows.
Please let us know about any questions or suggestions which you may have. As I said, we are very excited about this and would love to work with you to help you get an understanding of the system and improve upon it.
By the way, what version of the Innovation News Installation Profile did you install? From what I can gather, it doesn't seem that you used the latest 1.0 release when you installed your site. I could be wrong though.
updating mods today
we're updating several modules this morning, including the latest inews version. i grabbed the beta a while ago.
have a question about captions... are you leaving them out purposely in the article view? we're bringing them back, also want to be able to have more image play control, post multiples, put them on the sides, etc.
we'll keep in touch as it goes.
daj
if everyone is thinking alike, chances are no one is thinking.
www.davidandrewjohnson.com
if everyone is thinking alike, chances are no one is thinking.
www.davidandrewjohnson.com
our progress
have posted a blog about the experience so far:
http://www.davidandrewjohnson.com/?p=323
here's a quick summary the highlights though:
biggest issues in terms of news play:
you have to have captions and more control over image play. journalism requires it. we've added image assist to do this, and need to mod out the front page view to pick up the new content.
you need multimedia capabilities. news sites today are more than text and pictures in articles. we push multimedia storytelling.
edition manager could be very powerful and useful, but needs to have more taxonomy than 1,2,3. we traditionally publish by date/time or theme, sometimes both. interior navigation between edition content pieces needs to be built in so a sidebar that gives the table of contents for a given edition group plays with every article. ideally, this could be made granular so that, for example, a weekly magazine could have standing departments (letters to the editor, columns, quick hits, product reviews) and feature pieces ordered. This would also work for broadcast if the editions were organized a-block, b-block, c-block.
front page views: we're going to develop some different front page treatments. horizontal photos, banner heads, blocks for feature content or newsfeeds, weather, etc. docked in, they could all be switched on given a certain pass in the news.
ads: newspapers need ads to get paid. the profile should have banners and text ads built in. also metrics off the control center.
that's all for now. we'll keep at it and keep reporting back.
if everyone is thinking alike, chances are no one is thinking.
www.davidandrewjohnson.com
if everyone is thinking alike, chances are no one is thinking.
www.davidandrewjohnson.com
Feature Requests
Regarding an Image Captions feature, do you mean something like this?
In developing the Innovation News Profile, we used a "least common denominator" approach. We wanted to provide users with everything they need to run a base system, without "including everything but the kitchen sink". This is similar to the approach taken by Drupal itself. After all, Drupal does not even include the Image or Views modules by default. Thankfully, both systems are modular. As you note, you are able to take advantage of that fact to add the specific features which you need.
Many of your requests have been requested by other users. Specifically, support for Image captions and text names for Editions have been popular requests, and we at the OPL have had some discussions regarding support for advertisements. As these features are highly requested and would likely be useful to a wide audience, they will certainly be considered for future releases of the Innovation News Profile.
Thank you again for the input. We at the OPL truly want the Innovation News Profile to be software "of the people, by the people, and for the people". It's great to hear concerns and requests from the community, and we are enthusiastic to consider these concerns as we continue to develop the software.
Keep us posted with any questions or comments you have.