Posted by tecsbrain on October 5, 2007 at 7:41pm
There's a lot of great information on this website, and Drupal seems like a really great system to do what we want to do; but I've got a vanilla installation of Drupal up and I'm having a hard time figuring out where to go from here.
I see what people have done and I guess I have an idea of what I'd like to do, but......where to go from here, I'm a bit lost!
Any help would be greaaaatttlyy appreciated.
Comments
The basic installation gives
The basic installation gives you core functionality and everything set to default. You got to figure out what you need first and then proceed to finding out how to get there.
Here are few examples of tweaking one of the sites that I made (just the technical side of it for my firends). It was a news site for our city (800k people, so quite a lot happening over there).
This plus hundreds of smaller things (like playing with a theme, changing the order of comments, etc.) made a fully functional site.
As I said in the begining, first you need to ask yourself what you want. Then look for ready-made solutions (chances are someone already wanted the same thing, right?). If you can't find it, ask in the forums (for more in-depth answers) or on IRC (if you need something quick and small... #drupal-support on irc.freenode.net).
Well we're a monthly
Well we're a monthly publication with our stories very tightly grouped into four specific sections (I like the "channels" approach that the NY Observer uses). We'd like to preserve that organization for the online version. The main page should have our biggest cover story in the most prominent position and then our other cover stories below and our cover teasers to the right. We want the basic functionality - comments, maybe blogs...and the ability to add major features if they present themselves.
The big question I have -- we already know WHAT we want -- is HOW sites like the Observer got this all together? I've looked at some admin screens until I started drooling and I still don't see HOW to get what they did; even the one screenshot in the Observer article didn't even look like anything I could find.
Upon further consideration, I think the confusion on my part is that since Drupal isn't purpose-built for running a newspaper site, there doesn't seem to be any one right way to doing what we want...and I'm seeing where this site did this, that site did that, and can't figure out what this site should do. I think what I'm looking for is a "how to" but really everything's "how you can" because of Drupal's...let's say flexibility.
I could still use some assistance, though, on what to do with this Drupal installation to get it to work as we want it to work.
As an example, I know I want things in sections...what steps do I execute to configure Drupal such that, when I post an article, it can be placed into a particular section and that section only? I want to be able to add pictures to articles...what steps do I execute to be able to attach pictures to articles when they are being posted?
I hope this makes sense!
simple solutions: 1.
simple solutions:
1. sections.
I'm assuming you're gonna use "story" content type for your articles.
a. click administration -> categories -> add vocabulary (or use this path: /admin/content/taxonomy/add/vocabulary )
b. type in "section" in the vocabulary name input.
c. make sure "story" is checked in the "types" part of the form. the rest is not relevant right now. submit the form.
d. click administration -> categories -> add terms next to "section" vocabulary (most likely /admin/content/taxonomy/1/add/term - "1" is an ID of "section" vocabulary if no other vocab was created before...).
e. type in "science" as the name and submit.
f. repeat steps d and e few times (with "arts", "sports" and "sick jokes"). congratulations, you now have your sections.
Now... every time you add or edit a node of the "story" type, you'll be able to select a section for it. When you click on a "sports" link next to an article, you'll be shown a page that presents teasers of all stories from that section (sorted by date, desc). Tip: use path module (it's built-in) to create url aliases for your taxonomy terms, so instead of mypaper.com/taxonomy/term/3 it would appear as mypaper.com/sports. Tip 2: you might want to place links to the most prominent sections in your primary links.
2. images
There was a related item on posting images in articles a few days ago. Go ahead and read it to get some ideas.
The simplest (and very uncomfortable) way is just placing html tags witin your posts and storing images in a place that's accessible via http.
Example: upload example.jpg via ftp to /home/myself/mysites/images.mypaper.com which is a document root for images.mypaper.com domain.
When editing your article, make sure "full html" is selected in "input format" section (otherwise you won't be able to use <img> tag). In the body, use this html code somewhere: <img src="http://images.mypaper.com/example.jpg" />
Get Mercer's Book
If you can quickly get your hands on a copy, I found David Mercer's book to be an excellent introduction. It doesn't cover the more advanced feature set, but it gives you a solid foundation in the basic Drupal concepts, which is all you need to launch off into your own direction. I wrote a review of this book here:
http://www.stevensmedia.com/blog/?p=129
GateHouse and Drupal
In case you missed the news ... this might interest some of you here ...
GateHouse is asking all of its developers to learn Drupal.
http://www.howardowens.com/2007/gatehouse-media-adopts-drupal-as-seconda...
Shocking
I am absolutely shocked by this news, Howard.
:-)
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Hey tecsbrain, we have just
Hey tecsbrain, we have just finished the Drupal based Newspaper Site http://zaberbote.de . I plan to write about how things were done. However of cause the site can't compete against the other big newspaper sites that have recently been published. Still maybe this is anyway more or less what you are looking for as the ZaberBote is a Newspaper that was published the first time last Friday in the local area and will be delivered free once a month to the people in the surrounding villages. What might be interesting to you is that the ZaberBote site was built within a month from the scratch with about 20 full days of active work of two people.
Didn't know about this group before we started and I have read a couple of things already how things could be done better than we did however I am still happy about the site as I know that we'll be adding features on our way and won't be stuck with a inflexible system.
Sebastian