Hi all,
Anyone up for a collaboration to build a multisite for small- to mid-sized journals?
Let me explain.
OP2 did a marvelous job for me way back. I showed the possibilities and what one can achieve with Drupal. In my case this resulted in a website that has a complete archive of a literature journal, with author-controlled biographies, blogs, events... and hopefully soon an e-shop (cf. Ubercard), mobile webapp (cf. Services), metadata-standards based exports (MarcXML, MODS), archival/preservation (cf. exports to Internet archive)...
I have to say that OP did not achieve all of this. OP served as an inspiration, but I quite radically had to change the content types, adding some features here and there... and ended up with something that was closely related to OP, yet quite different.
The thing is however, that the work I've done is for a journal with little or no funds. All for free, cause I simply love the journal and its editorial board. I know for a fact that a lot of people out there are also struggling to get a website up for the (literature/art/...) journal. Sadly enough, because most of these journal do not have any funding they end up with a Wordpress site, Joomla site... which are great but not ready for the future days of webdesign.
I always wondered why nobody is collaborating on building a centralized multisite in Drupal, setting out the data structure, adding the basic features and basically collaborate on a shared journal magazine, sort of like a Software-as-a-Service, but managed and payed by the collection of journals. Surely, this is financially easily sustainable, if we build the first built ourselves and possibly later on pay people to maintain the package.
For we journals do not differ in our data-structure I'd say, more so, we are so alike that this should be fairly easy to do.
Any thoughts, questions, enthousiastic replies...?
Cheers,
Dakke
Comments
Are you sure that no-one is doing this?
I would have though that any drupal development agency working within the publishing industry might well be making use of multisites to maintain similar journal sites, but that this might not be apparent to the end user.
If you are more thinking of the creation of a distribution that eases a multisite setup, I wonder if you have looked at Ulmus - http://drupal.org/project/ulmus.
Penn state university use multisites really effectively, and building from their ulmus distribution might provide a good foundation for your multiple journal focussed setup.
If you think there is a space waiting for a journal specific multisite project, go for it, as you say, the requirements would seem to be similar. I have made a single site journal site in drupal before (for free) and I think it probably was a better fit for them than a wordpress site would have been.
useful comparison
a quick browse shows some other comparisons of journal type projects - eg http://groups.drupal.org/node/92139
are any of these of use to you?
But where are they...?
@ autopoietic
True, most likely there are dev companies doing exactly that. The problem is, as you rightly say, to find them.
So in a sense it is indeed more of a call to see whether there are any others out there with the same need of publishing journals without a huge budget and distributed hassle of maintenance.
Concerning the alternatives:
- prosepoint is a no-go, lack of extension
- OP too limited, newspaper orientated
- Nodestream seems a good idea, doubt it is easy to extend
They are all distro's, I would be more interested in a collective/collaboration on the central goal to get journals out there. Not really to start building another OP, rather build a magazine config and then let others chip in.
But one needs a critical mass to achieve a viable collective. Hoped that some might have come across such collectives...
Understood (?)
I think I misread your concern first time round.
Re-stated: you are happy enough to create a flexible platform to represent journals online using whichever drupal modules fit the requirements, but you would like to get together a collection of journals that are interested in order that you can share resources and ideas to set it up.
Exactly, part of the topic
Exactly, part of the topic was to raise that interest. Which seems to work on some level. Anyone who is interested is free to get in touch.