News site module wish list

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yelvington's picture

If you were to ask Santa Claus to bring you something to help your news site building/integration projects this year, what would you ask for?

Some examples: NITF import? NewsML import? Proprietary import from (fill in the blank legacy newsroom CMS)? Quark integration? InDesign integration? Web-to-print classifieds? Facebook tools? Javascript "badges?"

What would position Drupal as a more effective tool for you to improve your website, cut costs, connect with a larger audience, provide more effective community services, et cetera?

Post your answers below.

Comments

a few of mine (for the future)

kpaul's picture
  • Drupal to InDesign (or Quark)
  • Web to Print Classifieds (similar to above) - maybe an API for Drupal to InDesign?
  • Better forums (altho this is being worked on, I think...)
  • Easier single-login method for sites on different servers
  • MULTIPLE IMAGE UPLOAD and an EASY way to post it inline with content.

That's it for now... ;)

Thanks.

K. Paul Mallasch - Publisher
kpaul media

better forums

All4data's picture

that is possible by utilising the integration with vBulletin software via the www.vbdrupal.org fork

once you integrate with vBulletin you open a whole different set of abilities to add to the strength of Drupal

Two issues with that

yelvington's picture

I have two issues with that.

One is that forking Drupal is one of the worst ideas I've heard so far this year. (So far, I have not turned the TV on to Fox News.)

The other is that I don't get the whole "better forum" thing, and I've been using and running online forums since 1985.

Near as I can tell, the "better forum" calls tend to boil down to "make it work exactly like Brand X that I started out with." We used to call this the Baby Duck Syndrome.

Brand X tends to be packed with obscure edge-case features that appeal to a tiny percentage of the users, something we used to call Feeping Creaturism.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for improving Drupal.

But I'd like to see specifics on how the forum software can be improved. Ideas like "make it easier to promote a comment to a forum topic" make sense to me; "make it look like vBulletin/phpBB/whatever" don't.

The vast majority of the potential userbase for a news site has no experience with, or loyalty to, vBulletin/phpBB/whatever, and the layout of the typical Brand X forum doesn't meet the needs a news site presents in terms of navigational and advertising integration.

I'm not working on a complex

femrich's picture

I'm not working on a complex print/web setup, so our needs are probably different from the more professional sites--but our experience is that better control over images and image galleries is a big priority for us. I'd like to see more done with the image module and associated modules.

Sounds about right

Bill Smith's picture

My list would include ...

  1. Better image gallery tools. (I find TinyMCE and IMCE reasonably good for images in articles -- but would love to have a much more robust gallery tool ... something like what your guys at Morris did for Bluffton, Steve.)

  2. Better cross-server and cross-database single login (as K Paul suggests).

  3. Smooth content export from Drupal to InDesign.

-- Bill

Drupal must stay out of the

jghyde's picture

Drupal must stay out of the hands of the evil corporate media.

Then...

Drupal needs a much better, and integrated mass email thing.

It really needs three components: 1) the ability to arrange node links (teaser links, events, et al) into custom formated HTML email, 2) archiving, and 3) bounce mangement (a la phplist).

heh. it's not the tool

kpaul's picture

it's how it's used. ;)

personally, i appreciate all Morris is doing to give back to the community.

email would be cool, but making it more Flickr-like to add photos to the site would help get people to contribute more, i think.

also, from what i'm seeing on AFP

kpaul's picture

http://www.andersonfreepress.net

the community loves the social networking tools (buddylist, PMs, etc.) they went absolutely gaga over the userpoints.

so maybe more social networking tools - i know someone's kinda working on activity module, but something along those lines to make the sites more sticky.

thanks,
K. Paul Mallasch - Publisher
kpaul media

Two missing functions

ZaphMann's picture

I have built a neat site with drupal - driven by taxonomy www.morethanoil.com, but things have stalled because getting content into the system is slow and clumsy. I have been to some drupal meetings but most Druplers (?) are more into the technical side, not the user side.

Two great modules would be:
1. something that would create nodes from existing documents - these docs could be in an email, text file, word etc.

  1. A module to PRELOAD 'tags' based on the taxonomy. For example I have over 120 words in my vocabularies and having to go down a long list and check ones that apply each time a document is entered is slow and consequently a user will tend to skip that. But if I had a module that I could set on to presearch the text for the words that would be excellent.

Hoping someone who's technical is interested.

PS: I used to be a programmer so I know this is doable, but it's many years since and I don't have time to learn another programming language anymore.

Listen to Andy Partridge for a better life.

...and if you read, buy a book

those modules

moshe weitzman's picture

i think you want taxonomy_import and suggested_terms module. you might also like taxonomy_manager module for quicly entering in that list of 120 if you don't import it.

getting content into the system always sucks no matter what the system is.

Thanks for the tips

ZaphMann's picture

Moshe
Thanks for the tips. I don't need taxonomy_import as my taxonomy is built and I couldn't find a module named 'suggested_terms'. I looked through all the taxonomy modules (a baffling array) and don't see any that would simply scan incoming content and check found terms within the existing site taxonomy.

Best
Zaph

Listen to Andy Partridge for a better life.

...and if you read, buy a book

Drupal to InDesign should

stdbrouw@groups.drupal.org's picture
  • Drupal to InDesign should be a breeze once there's a views-to-xml export - it has long been a feature request for the Views Bonus Pack, but nobody really seems to care for it except the people over here :) I'd share my homebrew "xmlize" module if it wasn't such a mess.
  • You know what would be amazing? Being able to feed back copyfitting information from InDesign to Drupal. Bye-bye InCopy.
  • Better forums - I agree
  • Multiple image upload, yes, but I don't want an easy way to post it inline, I want the images to be spread over the length of the article evenly and automatically. That'd be great.
  • Better batch-creation and editing options. Being able to post a bunch of dummy articles with only the correct titles, for example, allows me to keep track of what's in and who's ignoring deadlines, but now I have to do that manually. (Pageroute provides some help.)

And I could just keep on going. Heh.

inDesign

yelvington's picture

Is there a document describing a standard XML representation that InDesign likes?

And would this be a "one article at a time" thing? That part's actually quite easy. NITF output wouldn't take more than a few hours of coding.

Indesign to Drupal

samdiener's picture

Hello,
Thanks for asking. We layout the magazine in Indesign. Once we layout the print publication, we need to import the articles into Drupal.
We've been using CS2, which created garbage xhtml tied to GoLive. So we've been using a free rtf export plugin, text exporter from Rorohiko, but then we have to load each author, teaser, title, and body text by hand into drupal. We've recently upgraded to Indesign CS3, which is supposed to export xhtml with tags mapped to a CSS, but the CS3 export to xhtml feature isn't working for me. I have to call Adobe about that.
I'm hoping that there will be a way of mapping our Indesign paragraph styles into xhtml tags which can then be automatically mapped (some sort of xslt?) into our drupal mysql database. Maybe there's a way of doing this already that I don't know about, but it would be very useful.
As Zaph said, being able to add some codes which fit our drupal taxonomy would be great, because we have to do that with the long menu as well.
Image handling for multiple images for one article would be great, as others have said above.
In Peace,

Co-Editor, Peacework Magazine
Global Thought and Local Action for Nonviolent Social Change
www.peaceworkmagazine.org
American Friends Service Committee New England Regional Office

Editor, Peacework
Global Thought and Local Action for Nonviolent Social Change
www.peaceworkmagazine.org (but testing a new OpenPublish-based platform at www.new.peaceworkmagazine.org)

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