Hi all,
Good day. Just wanted to pop my head in and let everyone know about the new newspaper cms we've been developing. I did a Drupal showcase write up on it a couple of months ago but that seems to have faded away into obscurity.
And then I thought it might be an interesting point for discussion here on this group.
We've learnt many things from doing ProsePoint and applied (and hopefully improved) them in this new project. Things like image handling and rich editors (a perennial topic), teaser images, complex layouts etc. have been revamped, and if people here are interested, we could do a write up or two and perhaps offer some insights into them.
Anyway, enough talk from me. You can check out the new ProsePoint Express at http://www.prosepoint.net.
ProsePoint Express is actually based on Drupal (well, Pressflow 6.x actually), although the newspaper cms is a separate and distinct layer on top of Drupal. (You can read about this at Using Drupal as an application framework for a massively multisite cms)
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to treat this as an unofficial show-and-tell and Q&A and ask whatever you want.
Thank you all for reading!
Beng Tan
Comments
Thanks for the interesting
Thanks for the interesting read. It's always informative to read other developers perspectives on building Drupal sites. I noticed that you are now a completely pay for hosting based solution where as previously you had released the code for prosepoint. Is this no longer happening ?
While I understand the reasoning for this potential switch from a business perspective it makes learning via the code a little more difficult. At the same time I now understand that you are building a CMS on top of Drupal rather than expanding Drupal. When I installed it previously I found it pretty useful but definitely headed in it's own direction that made it difficult to consider it Drupal.
I think that the thing that most Indymedia's could learn from this example in terms of developing our own custom CMS is that it may make sense to custom code a lot of modules specifically for indymedia deployment rather than rely on building on top of cck & views. Perhaps I'm wrong and using the drupal features project would make sense. I think that what is generally lacking in terms of Indymedia Drupal development is a concerted effort to build a easy to set-up and administer Drupal solution that fits all of the needs of an IMC in general. This includes open anonymous publishing balanced with spam control (is this possible without near 24 hour reverse moderation ?) as well as easy to use multimedia functionality (that has to compete with youtube and others for accessibility and ease of use to attract lay users to use the IMC site)
One feature that I liked about Prosepoint was the integration of images and thumbnails. This can be done about 100 different ways under Drupal but is really important that it is done well as to avoid breaking a site layout. I've found it shouldn't be left entirely to users via HTML but giving them some control over the layout makes sense as well. This is something that Prosepoint did well out of the box whereas many Indymedia's have issues with this.
That's all of my thoughts on the matter at this time. I think that Prosepoint is an interesting project but not likely to be useful for indymedia sites since it is a hosted solution that wouldn't provide the anonymity expected from an IMC site.