Posted by yelvington on December 4, 2008 at 5:07pm
I've previously mentioned that we at Morris have been working on a standard configuration to support moving all of our newspaper sites to Drupal. We began by jumping into the deep end of the pool with our biggest and most complicated problem (oops, I mean newspaper): the Florida Times-Union. We threw the switch Wednesday morning and made the new Jacksonville.com site live.
We do plan to release code, templates and configurations, but we're not nearly ready to do that yet. We have to move on to rebuild the Topeka Capital-Journal's website, CJOnline.com, and evolve a standard setup that we're happy with. Meanwhile, I've been blogging about some of the details, and you can follow along.
Comments
Calendar of events
Steve, site looks great. Noticed you used Zvents for your calendar application. Did you try developing something in Drupal?
Suzanne L.
We have, but ...
We have used the Events module, and I think it could be made to do everything we need, but Zvents was a faster/shorter path and includes some content acquisition (screen scraping) advantages.
On the other hand, their lack of XML feeds is maddening.
Zvents xml
An update: Zvents does have an XML feed, and even better, it has an API that can hand back all sorts of interesting XML. So that should teach me to believe what I'm told. :-)
Awesome newspaper site. I
Awesome newspaper site. I like the layout very much, the positioning of the Ads are great especially the flash banner ad.
Netlink Technologies Ltd
http://shyamala-drupal.blogspot.com/
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions
Ad positions
The ad positions are becoming an industry standard. We refer to it as the "ABC and sometimes D" layout: Banner at the top, "flex position" in the right rail for anything up to a 300 x 600 IAB "half page," a banner at the bottom, and an "in-story" position that we implement only on some editorial content.
One of the challenges for any newspaper contemplating using Drupal for site management is that there are no publicly available themes designed to accommodate these positions. We hope to fix that by releasing a solid base theme as part of this project.
Releasing a Newspaper theme
Releasing a Newspaper theme is cool! We should do that too.
Netlink Technologies Ltd
http://shyamala-drupal.blogspot.com/
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions
Awsome
Steve, awsome site, really love the theme. Is the classifieds section all Drupal based as well ? If so its so so clean looking, best Ive seen
Morris classifieds
We've used Drupal for the primary site management tool, but integrated with a number of other systems.
Our classifieds actually are managed by a system we built years ago using C/C++, Oracle, and a templating system of our own design called MTL (Morris Template Language).
Until fairly recently we sold it as a commercial product, and behind the scenes it powers the online classifieds of a number of major media companies on three continents. In addition to "liner" classifieds, the same core is used for real estate and automotive vertical sites.
The emergence of disruptive technologies -- especially the LAMP stack, and now Drupal -- have changed the landscape significantly and lowered the cost of building solutions in this space. But for us, our current system is entirely sunk costs, so there's no strong reason to switch.
We're actually processing some editorial content (the AP feed) by running it through MTL to produce full HTML pages, and giving Drupal an RSS feed to use to manage headlines and links.