Hi all, great group here, I'm learning a lot.
I'm not a web developer, but I've got a bit of Drupal experience and am trying to facilitate a changeover from the current, old-school CMS we have at a small English-language newspaper in Taiwan. My main point of confusion is how to get the editorial content we are working with into Drupal.
We currently use a very old piece of editorial software called Newsdesk, I believe it was done in-house for lack of good Chinese-language software at the time. This software is able to send content to our website directly, so I suppose it must have some sort of XML output, but I'm not sure how rich can be given that we are trying to add different kinds of content. As it stands, we just have blocks of text and photos at the top, with no variation. I worry that Newsdesk will break down if we try videos, slide shows, or anything of that nature.
My question then is the best way to allow content to run through the editorial process (journalist -> editor -> copyeditor -> editor -> website). I have seen some hints about doing this all through Drupal, but I'm a bit hazy on this. I have also seen some mention of ContentWatch, but I'm afraid that might be expensive.
Is there are any open source (or cheap) web publishing/editorial software that would allow all of the necessary steps but sync well with Drupal, or is it possible to use Drupal alone? My editors are anything but tech people, so I hope I can find an easy solution.
Thanks,
Nikhil
Comments
You're in good company...
Good news, there happens to be a small but growing Drupal community in Taipei, me included. Perhaps we could meet up to discuss your project, it sounds interesting. We'll need to be able to look at the code you're using to answer some of your questions. If "small English-language" means small budget then you'll certainly want to tap into the magic of the open source community.
Perhaps everything you need is available right in Drupal or more likely can be built/customized using the Drupal framework.
Drupal as a newsroom CMS
There are some case histories posted here of newspapers using Drupal as an internal newsroom CMS. The Workbench family of modules for D7 is quite good. The only thorny issues involve two-way interfacing with print page layout (InDesign), and if you can live with copy/paste or just pull an XML file from Drupal (and refrain from the very bad practice of editing copy on print pages) you shouldn't have any real problems with a small publication.
What about the Thomson Reuters Calais Web Service content?
If I want access to the Thomson Reuters content, am I better off using the OpenPublish? I would also like to have all the data tagged with RDF and hopefully schema.
As a college professor (Management), I have access to ABI/Inform & EBSCOhost, but I'm not sure how to get them into Drupal. My tech skills are pretty basic. My original thoughts were to load the Desktop Drupal 7 and then add OpenPublish on top of it. After everything I've read it seemed that the non-tech administrator could use it.
I actually gave OpenPublish a call & they suggested that I consider using Drupal Gardens. I have worked my way through the Tom Geller videos for Drupal Gardens and Drupal 7 Essentials and have a basic grasp on Drupal 7.
I own the domain name for my site "The Other Cheek" which is hosted at 1 and 1. I'd appreciate your thoughts on my approach.
OpenCalais
OpenCalais module is still only alpha for D7. I have not tested it.
Keep in mind that Calais is a text-mining engine for your content. It does not provide you with access to Reuters news wires. The other sources you described typically are licensed for research use and not for republication.
Dropdown menu
Does anybody know the easy way to create a dropdown menu? I want to get a drop down list if I hover on a primary link that has secondary links attached to it. I know how to do this on pure html and css but I am having problems doing the same thing on drupal (6). I'll appreciate your help
Drop-Down menu
@keswai use search and irc #drupal-support. And try to look on documentation, forums with similar issues, and ask there.
Comparison of various drop down menus
Generate markup for drop-down menus