Hi,
Just wanted to pop my head in and let everyone know of the new release of ProsePoint (www.prosepoint.org), a CMS for publishing online newspapers and magazines.
If you look closely at ProsePoint, you'll discover it's derived from Drupal. In fact, it's a Drupal distribution bundled into a single tarball for easy download. Of course, that means there's third party code in there, but it's all in the name of making life easier for end users.
It's been a while since I last posted about it, but ProsePoint is still alive and kicking. Version 0.07 is just the latest of several incremental releases over the last 3 ish months. Instead of boring you with details, I'll just point you to http://www.prosepoint.org where you can find out more for yourself.
Thank you.
Comments
Nice work
I installed a demo site at http://prosepoint.bmannconsulting.com. Actually, I ripped out all the modules that were duplicated from Acquia, and just copied your install profile over. So it's "Acquia Prosepoint" :P
I'm just poking through the install profile. There are some helper functions in there that would be good to have in install profile API directly (e.g. insert file would go in an upload.inc file in the core folder).
I respect your decision to run stuff over on LaunchPad, and I definitely think offering a bundled tarball is a nice experience for installs, but I still believe that a "bare" install profile (i.e. without tinymce or the modules, etc.) on Drupal.org will get you more developer traction.
I'll keep checking in and see what I can merge into install profile API. Any comments on what else you'd like to see in there? I feel like someone could tackle all the CCK-related stuff and put together some nice helper functions.
Thanks
Hi,
Ah yes, the beauty of open source - you can re-mash it. I haven't really look at Acquia in detail (too busy working on ProsePoint), but it's good to know they are interoperable to some extent.
If you want to copy any functions into the install_profile_api module, please go ahead. I don't have any problems with that. While I try to write my functions to be generic, they may still need a bit more generalisation to be suitable, so you may have to tinker a bit. Don't worry about breaking compatibility with prosepoint.profile - if I update my version of install_profile_api, I'll deal with any code integration issues then.
If you look in the sources, you may see a scattering of comments pointing to workarounds. I had a lot of trouble with programmatically creating nodes with CCK fields. In the end, I had to settle for direct database writes. It may have been because I was initially using an early version of CCK with some bugs which are now fixed in more recent versions. Unfortunately, there's little ROI in going back and redoing the node creation code again (It was a semi-painful experience).
Similarly, there may be other workarounds - I can't remember off the top of my head. If you run into anything that raises questions, feel free to ping me to discuss my reasoning for doing things the way I have. You can contact me either here, privately through the contact forms at drupal.org/user/... or ProsePoint, or however else you can manage.
Yes, no, maybe ... still pondering on this point.
Nothing particular that immediately comes to mind. I don't actually use much of install_profile_api (maybe I did initially, but not as much in the present version), maybe a couple of small functions that could trivially have been replicated with prosepoint.profile itself.
I tended to need a bit more control over the database such that using some of the larger functions (ie. maybe those with 6-10 or more lines of code) of install_profile_api would have been as much work as not using it. Or they just didn't quite fit right. Please don't take this as a criticism of install_profile_api, because I'm arguably doing things on a somewhat larger scale than what it was intended for.
Thanks for your feedback. Comments are always welcome.
--
ThinkLeft - http://thinkleft.com.au/services/drupal
ProsePoint - http://www.prosepoint.org
+1
+1 for what Boris said. An install profile on Durpal.org would have much more advantages. Prosepoint would benefit much more from the community. Prosepoint seems to be the greatest module/combination for newspaper sites i could find for drupal. Very good work.
Hope your final decision would be to publish it on drupal !
not very well laid out
I hate to be mean but prosepoints layout structure (at least in the demo you have) is terrible. Nothing lines up and it's very messy.
No thanks
that's the best you can do...
I'll enjoy being mean here. Your comment provides nothing of value and insults another person's hard work. This is perhaps the most useless form of feedback possible. Here is an alternate way of saying the same thing so that it is constructive.
"This is an interesting idea. I noticed that in the layout structure of the demo the different elements on the page do not line up. For example, the vertical line on the left of the search bar is not visually continued in the columns further down the page. The horizontal separation between stories in the columns of the body do not continue to the left or right across any other columns. This is especially noticeable at the bottom of the 2nd and 3rd columns where the grey lines are only a few vertical pixels apart from each other. See the attached document where I've highlighted some of these problems."
I'm not a designer. You seem to be. Even without that skill all it took was 5 minutes to look at the page, provide guidance on how to make it look better, and make you look like an asshat (added bonus).
EDIT: Attachment not working consistently? here's another attempt...
--
Growing Venture Solutions | Drupal Dashboard | Learn more about Drupal - buy a Drupal Book
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
Well done
greggles: Thank you for your thoughtful response to that terse and unhelpful comment. I would not have been so successful.
Successfully creating a newspaper-style layout is incredibly difficult, namely because CSS provides few means to vertically place and align elements. I suspect that JavaScript may be necessary to create a true, rigid newspaper-style layout: object heights would need to be calculated, and absolute positioning would be adjusted as a page is rendered. (This, of course, could vary across browsers. Sigh!)
Of course, tables could do the trick, but to speak of such a thing is blasphemy.
Todd Ross Nienkerk
Co-founder, Four Kitchens
Todd Ross Nienkerk
Digital Strategist and Partner
Four Kitchens: Big ideas for the web
IRC: toddross
In contrast to sinbsd, i
In contrast to sinbsd, i really like the design :)
Don't let moaners break down your motivation!
For sinbsd, i know a nice little video to watch: http://drupal-labo.com/getinvolved.avi :)
Pro-ProsePoint?
ProsePoint was a really great starting point for a site I'm doing for a publication. For the next sort of phase we will probably build from scratch (will be integrating quite a bit of community support which may get hairy the way ProsePoint is currently configured), but it was a great start for what sort of modules I needed, and how to format them. I find the layout to be a really great base template b/c of the number of blocks available w/out doing any sort of template adjustment.
The only real issue I've ran into (and it may be a Tiny MCE question rather than just for ProsePoint) is that after installing Tiny MCE for all text fields, it behaves very buggy, making my code disappear when trying to create a linked image. Anybody else have this problem?
--erica ^-^
Thanks to everyone ...
Hi,
Thanks to everyone for defending me and/or ProsePoint!
When I first saw the comment by sinbsd, I figured he was trolling, so decided not to reply to it. Never would I expect that others would jump so readily into the brawl on my behalf! Thank you very much.
@greggles: I will take your comments into consideration. Probably won't be working on the demo anytime soon, but I know it needs an overhaul sooner or later.
Laying out nodes to match vertically and horizontally is a known problem with CSS. It's the usual 'CSS doesn't handle vertical aligning across adjacent divs' issue. In practice, a site operator could theoretically make everything line up by adjusting teasers word by word (and possibly hard wiring some dimensions, like Todd Nienkerk suggested), but that's very theme and context specific. Needless to say, I didn't do this for the demo.
@Liabo: You're right, if you're trying to build a social network, ProsePoint doesn't really offer any additional help towards that. I think it's probably not quite the right tool for the job.
If you'd like to file an issue for your Tinymce problems, I'd be glad to have a look.
--
ThinkLeft - http://thinkleft.com.au/services/drupal
ProsePoint - http://www.prosepoint.org
Channels
If you don't mind me asking, how did you accomplish creating the different channels that stories can be published to (and then creating index pages for each of those channels in the navigation menu)? Is there a module for that, or did you have to do it yourself?
It's an open source custom module
It's a module that was specifically written for ProsePoint, and which is available as part of ProsePoint. The module isn't hosted on Drupal.org because it doesn't work as a standalone module.
--
ThinkLeft - http://thinkleft.com.au/services/drupal
ProsePoint - http://www.prosepoint.org
--
ThinkLeft - http://thinkleft.com.au/services/drupal
ProsePoint - http://www.prosepoint.org
Just starting with Drupal for newspaper site
I'm a newbie to CMS and Drupal in particular.
I'm familiar with PHP,CSS,Javascript,MySQL ... -- so I'm looking at Joomla and Drupal.
I'm developing a news aggregator site on 1and1.com (shared hosting) with a combination of content from contributors (not general readers yet), some syndicated content, and lots of (too much!) banner advertising.
I got most of basic drupal 6 working with the FCKeditor added on (Exceptions : cron and clean URLs), but that's clearly not enough for an author/editor system. So I thought I'd give prosepoint a try.
I have plenty of space on 1and1, so I presume I should just start a new Prosepoint/Drupal from scratch, rather than trying to load it over my existing stuff. This is all for evaluation right now, so I can do it all over in a different way later (Aquia or whatever ...)
TIA, Alan
ps Don't even bother to look at my existing site -- it wasn't done by me!
Oh-oh : Clean URLs required
I guess I can't try PP until I figure out how to get Clean URLs working on 1and1.com shared hosting.
I'll try Dreamhost
I have an account on Dreamhost. They seem to support full Drupal 6, so I'll try it out there.
Tada! Prosepoint on Dreamhost
http://www.qumbu.com/qpp/
I couldn't get mysql to add a user from the command line.
mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES ON your_database.* TO 'your_username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your_password';
didn't work (And, yes : I DID make the substitutions. 'localhost' became 'msyql.qumbu.com' on Dreamhost).
The web control panel didn't let me set CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES
I don't know if that's fatal.
I had to go into settings and change
$base_url = 'http://www.qumbu.com/qpp'; // NO trailing slash!
I had to switch from php4 to php5 to turn register_globals off
slate.fr done with ProsePoint
http://www.slate.fr/
Some well known journalists deliver their blog articles dressed up as "expertise" :-)
A good demonstration that drupal works !
Still based on Drupal
Is this still a Drupal bundle? Nothing "open" seems to be involved.
Have a look at openPublish
Have a look at openPublish http://openpublishapp.com/
Thanks redben. I loved what I
Thanks redben. I loved what I saw with OpenPublish and a few days ago when I tried a test install locally on Win 7/XAMPP it was a complete nightmare. Despite setting the high memory and time requirements it was a no go. My guess is it's also related to the Drupal version (6.x) because I then installed 7.x like a breeze. As I'm on a rigid virtual host (GoDaddy) I've had to fore go the OpenPublish idea and am building on 7.x with modules galore.
1 and 1
Has anyone attempted to use Drupal 7 and OpenPublish on 1 and 1 as the host? Did you encounter any problems? If you don't mind, I am a true non-techie and detailed experiences and fixes would be appreciated.
Ron