Hi,
I'm Geoff Burke. I am the Web Manager for the Georgia Straight newspaper, an 40-year-old alternative weekly in Vancouver Canada.
We went live on Drupal 4.7 at the beginning of November (www.straight.com) after going through quite an arduous project to move over more than 20,000 articles from our home-grown IIS/MS-SQL/Coldfusion system. Our biggest challenge was creating a module that displayed articles by section (news, music, Movies, etc.) for a given issue. Teething problems mostly now aside, things seem to be just fine.
We (like everybody) are still trying to figure out our direction on the web. But, I moved us to Drupal with the idea that, while not having everything we need as a newspaper, it should be flexible enough to rapidly build what we need. It's been a steep learning curve however, luckily, we have some great Drupal resources here in Vancouver who have helped us.
The challenge that I see for myself now is helping my company navigate its way into the brave new world of online publishing while continuing to answer the question 'why newspapers matter'.
I hope Drupal itself as well as discussions within this group will help.
Comments
Drupal resources
Geoff,
Can you explain the great Drupal resources you have in Vancouver? Might they be something we could take advantage of south of the border? Any excuse to visit Vancouver is a good excuse!
Andy
Bryght
There is a huge Vancouver hub of Drupalers, centered on Bryght.com, which has 5 or 6 core developers (including the author of PHPTemplate) on staff.
You should attend NorthernVoice and the MooseCamp that goes with it. Last year, they had a DrupalCon in the two days beforehand.
It's a bit far for me, but you should definitely go.
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http://ken.therickards.com/
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http://ken.therickards.com/
Raincity Studios
Raincity studios, in association with Bryght, have also begun doing Drupal training sessions here in Vancouver. The first session was held in early November with both a programmer track and a designer/theming track. I believe they are looking towards another session some time next year.
question
Hi Geoff,
I just joined the group today. I'm just wondering what those things are that you needed but didn't get from Drupal. I am working for an online news service and we're using Drupal in some of our online projects. We are planning on redesigning one site (www.ipsnewsasia.net) and want to put some new features, such as podcasts and video. We've been having problems with the layout because if we break a paragraph in one story, this action would somehow either pull up or down the other stories in the column, which gives us a lopsided, unbalanced look on the homepage. Could this be a design problem or a CMS problem, or a terrible mismatch?