We want your feedback on OpenPublish

We've been waiting and waiting for Openpublish for Drupal 7! At this point, it would be far better to release a "stripped down" beta, than wait for all the mythical enhancements.

It SHOULD be far easier to upgrade and enhance OP 3.0 due to the move toward features and apps that you guys are using in the Openpublic release. I assume you will use the same approach in Openpublish.

Here's all we need to start making progress with Openpublish 3.0:

1) A basic Omega subtheme that works with existing alpha code.
2) A bit cleaner implementation of boxes, with more complete directions on how to use the interface. (in reality, even this could be skipped, since us Omega users can theme our pages perfectly well using Omega + Delta.)
3) A beta release of Opencalais, since it integrates with most everything else.
4) The core Openpublish content types

That's it! Then developers can start to theme, layout, and experiment with content while you guys continue to add functionality. If new features are implemented with "features" then we should be able to upgrade an existing development copy later with little difficulty.

JUST GET SOMETHING OUT THERE, PLEASE.

Danielle-

Thanks for asking for feedback and engaging the community for ideas. I agree with Zoon_unit that a less feature rich release is needed so the community can start helping build these features and apps to lessen the load on Phase 2 and do what drupal people do best...contribute! I am excited to hear you guys are close on a release, but what we need most right now is a stable version with a base theme, a simple story content type with Opencalais integrated and thats really it. I am hoping features are built as apps or using the features module so the core product doesn't have the extra bulk if you as a site owner don't need it.

My wish list would include features for the following:
Improved blogging platform for both staff and user generated blogs
Support for Domain access on all core openpublish features and modules
Media module integration with a VERY clean interface to easily add photo galleries via the media module and plupload.
Onsite Vimeo uploads through the media module and vimeo api.
Integrated user handling for cleaner registration, user profiles and spam control/moderation features built in.
Anything to help with site speed/performance!
An app for paywall access. Although we don't need it now, many of my clients are asking for it.
Standard set of SEO tools like pathauto, global redirect etc. etc.
PDF uploader/viewer simular to what the ipaper module does to upload digital editions and special sections.
Support for the new google standout tag with support for domain access
A well implemented nodequeue type set up to assign top content to the homepage
Breaking news templates that allow for easy promotion of breaking news with timers to pull it down after a period of time.

If these are accomplished, then I can install and launch my site with very little development work! :) Knowing that wont happen, I would love to contribute to the project with any features we can help build or test.

I would like to stress on the upgradeability. If there is no upgrade path from D6 to D7, that will be a big blow to people like us. Keeping that in mind, all future versions should have the facility to upgrade to future versions of Drupal.

Hi --

This didn't have enough documentation for this Drupal Newbie to make work. Blocks and views were confusing and apparently not easily used. Most of it seems to go through the context menu.

Finally gave up when I got to the page of customized modules that shouldn't be updated even though Drupal says to updated them. Oops.

Yes, I should have spent more time reading the directions before jumping into it.

Here are a couple of suggestions.

Calais seemed to generate errors -- You should try to make it run on a variety of php implementations for those using shared hosts.

Calais should prioritize results for local site before global site, perhaps separate links for this site and global sites. Calais should have config option to just show related content from local site.

Menu should be expanded to some kind of "Mega" Menu with more than two levels. Doubt Calais can substitute for carefully chosen hierarchy by person knowledgeable in subject matter of site.

Creating new content type (e.g. upper level submenu page) should be documented.

I really need something that others, including newbies, can contribute too. Path is all articles/, perhaps a dropdown menu showing different areas where articles can be stored to be used under submenus, though I 'll probably end up using taxonomy terms for my menu.

There ought to be an input lite basic input form. Don't need pictures, but would like drop down menus for tags, default author info, that's about it. Try to get it to fit on one screen.

Overall, OpenPub seemed slower than ordinary Drupal installation. Perhaps I need a better web host, perhaps I'll get more than one visitor at a time.

Mollum is great, though I haven't tested on a live site yet!

Development tools have an add content feature to generate content for site. Would be nice to include an "Undo" ustility that deleted all posts in past 3 hours or one day to get rid of clutter.

Wouldn't rush too much on D7. Seems like a bunch of the modules you use are still in beta or release candidate status.

More available themes to go along with directions for creating compatible themes would be nice.

I'll probably come back and look at this again, but not suitable for my needs right now.

Thanks,

Kirk B.

I was initially excited by the first OP release. Seemed like a dream come true, and ready-made template for a great news site. And if you stick with everything exactly the way it comes out of the box, that's what you get. But my excitement deflated once I began trying to make changes. Even a simple change like switching over to default teasers instead of using the separate teaser CCK field turned out to be impossible.

Most of the problems I ran into had to do with OP's reliance on theming. This was the most complicated theme I'd ever seen, and so much of what I saw seemed unnecessary. Most, if not all of the features I saw can be done with modules (Views, Display Suite, Panels, etc.). It seemed backward, a throwback to the pre-Views days when you had to do everything in the theme. And at the same time it used some advanced modules like Context. That made it doubly hard to figure out problems. It was like trying to reason with a schizophrenic.

If you can make the D7 version independent from the theme, it will make it a whole lot easier to work with. You should be able to enable any standard or base theme and make all the basic functions work. Maybe it won't look pretty, but it should at least work.

This doesn't mean ditch the special OP theme. But the included theme in OP should be set up as a guide, so site developers can use it for setting up other themes.

Thanks for all the work on this project, and I hope that it has a bright future.

Thanks @kirkcaraway for this insight. After loading and running head on into OP I made significant changes to the base structure, pages & taxonomy and Calais. Wooooh! The challenge now is to find what OP is doing with all the changes. It's like looking from the deck of a ship into the Pacific, and hoping to see the bottom.

Hello all,

I would like to offer some thoughts. I am completely new to Drupal, having made the decision to move away from Joomla for various reasons, after several years. I would very much like to rewrite our website (Science File - http://www.sciencefile.org) in Open Publish because, from what I have been reading, it offers many of the publishing features that I have found impossible to achieve with Joomla, particularly the Semantic Web services. So, I am not familiar with Drupal nor OP. Of course I realise there is a big learning curve ahead, but that does not put me off - I'm quite looking forward to it actually.

What I would like more than anything is easy-to-follow documentation, with examples. It should be remembered that there will be those like myself coming to Drupal and OP for the first time, and although, of course, I will have done a lot of background reading about Drupal, and have played around with a local installation of it, the OP documentation should be clear, concise and comprehensive for those who have never used it (or Drupal) before. For example, and off the top of my head, if I want to left-align an article image, where is the CSS I need to edit? If I want to include a drop capital at the start of an article, how would I achieve that? How will author information work exactly? How can I implement a useful and attractive comments system for articles? Can I create an efficient node-categorisation system using only tags and taxonomy (I'm used to doing it using relational database schemas)? Can I link a published article to a forum discussion with some sort of auto-discuss module? How can I include video in articles? What's the best way of generating a bibliography for both internal and external links? I'd like to see answers to questions like these in the documentation, either in the text or in a separate FAQ/How-To section (and apologies if any of these questions seem too simple!).

Some examples, therefore, of how to achieve common publishing tasks would be incredibly useful, because, apart from anything else, I won't have an infinite amount of time available to study these things, so any time saved would be much appreciated.

Lastly, the very best of luck with the D7 implementation of OP - I am really looking forward to getting started!

Happy Xmas!

Andy.

I'd like to second most of the ideas stated above and also thank the Openpublish development team for bringing OP to us all. It is an amazing tool that has allowed me to not only create an effective news site, but to also learn a whole heck of a lot about how drupal makes magic happen.

To comment on something that was brought up a few times above, more documentation would be great, especially the kind that @AndyTheAstronomer was talking about. A general guide to get people going.

But I would also like to say that we as drupal and OpenPublish users might take things upon ourselves to be a bit more diligent in contributing to the cause. That is to say, if you come up against a particularly odd or difficult problem for which there is no support or issue post, and you happen to find a solution or even if you can only root out the problem, post something about it. Chances are someone else has had or will have the same issue as you. And while a list of support resources is super helpful, information from actual users coming up against issues and solving problems is sometimes more useful.

Thanks all!

@ Danielle, have finally DUMPED OP2 6.x because it was a lot of trouble in the end.

Have now started using OP3 D7.x - everything has gone fine - except for one error - but I'm very pleased with the Alpha roll-out - it works just as I think you would expect out of the box.

I've a lot of tweaking to get to where I want to but the site so far took me two days and several coffees. The next phase should be exciting so I'm looking forward to the update.

Have a look at www.imagenews.com.au

cheers