An update on our Drupal conversion

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yelvington's picture

It's been awhile since I posted an update on the Morris project to build a newspaper site management system on the Drupal platform. We're moving toward a complete relaunch (and complete redesign) of Jacksonville.com, our largest newspaper site, in a couple of weeks. Some details are posted on my blog.

Major modules being used are:

CCK
Views
Panels 2
Content Recommendation Engine
Daypart (new module to be released by Morris)
FeedAPI
Image, Imagecache
Lightbox2
Nodequeue
Organic Groups
Signwriter
Webform
Buddylist
SWF tools
Feedburner
Fivestar, Voting API

There are also a bunch of Morris-specific modules that may or may not make sense for external release. For instance, our DTI feed is preprocessed into a custom Atom format that might be useful to others. We'll sort through those issues after launch.

Comments

Custom atom format

bonobo's picture

Hello,

Looking forward to seeing more of this -- thanks for sharing the details here and on your blog.

RE: "our DTI feed is preprocessed into a custom Atom format that might be useful to others." This sounds incredibly useful.

Cheers,

Bill


FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers

What is a Daypart?

kreynen's picture

I only ask because we are trying to rename what PEG locations typically refer to as theme blocks in the Open Media Project and daypart was one of the suggestions. A theme block has nothing to do with Drupal's themes or blocks, but is a reoccurring block of time that is given a name like "Arts and Entertainment" or "Faith Based".

Dayparting

yelvington's picture

Dayparting, as we're implementing it, is pretty simple. There's a scheduler that you can define begin/end times for dayparts. At the beginning of the part, the system homepage URL setting is changed; at the end, it reverts.

This works great in conjunction with Panels 2, which we're using to manage our homepage. You could prepare an alternate homepage layout for drivetime that promotes traffic cams, and an evening homepage layout that promotes forums, et cetera.

The homepage is the only page affected by the module, as we've designed it.

Launch plans

yelvington's picture

We're planning on rolling this out publicly Tuesday, Nov. 18. Some features won't become fully apparent for a couple of weeks -- first priority goes to chasing down all the loose ends of the existing site, which is huge.

Newspapers on Drupal

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