Hi Techies, Drupul Geeks ... and Newspaper Content Managers--
I am moving my current online no-budget e-zine to the 21st century. By most accounts online, Drupal has been named as the best possible candidate for an open source implementation of content management. I've looked for a few online newspaper templates in MonsterTemplates.com. There appear to be some that will work, but--here's where I am confused. The templates that I see look like what I would use for live/production content. I don't see a connection with installing Drupal and the newspaper theme combo on a live server... versus... how the content in process actually gets promoted to the live pages.
What's the general flow? Do most of you use 2 or more Drupal servers? One set for internal content management with a different sort of template for managing in-house content, then the second set as the world-facing servers with the newspaper-look-and-feel template loaded? If so, how are you managing the deployment or flow of content from the staging servers to the live servers? XML file transfers? Batch jobs that populate databases?
Please advise--I need all the help I can get!!:-)
Kind regards,
Paula DiTallo
plditallo@ieee.org
Comments
Newspaper platform
Hi Paula,
In our Newspaper platform content flows directly into the live version of Drupal, we use the same theme for our web content team as for the users. The Views, Nodequeues and CCK content creation forms make the web content management interface. The content presentation itself are in customized blocks. In our solution the content gets published real time.
What is the kind of workflow you are looking at? he templates that I see look like what I would use for live/production content - What do you mean by this?
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions
Shyamala -- Thanks so much
Shyamala --
Thanks so much for your response! When I was mentioning the templates I saw on Monster Templates, the example I had in mind is: http://www.templatemonster.com/drupal-themes/25563.html . To me, this particular template looks pre-formatted for what an end user would be browsing through online. I am imagining that the workspace which a person might log into to use in order to create/edit content would look more like a word processor with a submit button that would ultimately take the finished work through to the end-formatted content.
You mentioned that the Views, Nodequeues and CCK content creation forms make the web content management interface--is this the raw/out-of-the-box capability that comes with a Drupal install?
Kind regards,
Paula DiTallo, CABM
plditallo@ieee.org
plditallo@metro-design-dev.com
url: www.metro-design-dev.com
I am imagining that the
Nope. This is one of the things that confuses some people new to Drupal. The website IS the content management system. There is no backend. You're not preparing stuff to be pushed into production. It's a live system. When you post questions and comments here at groups.drupal.org, you're using that functionality.
It's possible to install an administrative theme (Rootcandy, for example) for /admin, /node/add/* and /node/*/edit pages so that they look different and get rid of some of the layout (ad stack, etc.) but you're still operating in one environment.
At our newspapers, we typically have a separate "inside" system for content management, but it's not Drupal, as we have (mostly print-related) needs that are better met with other tools. We feed data to Drupal in XML format, and in the near future we'll be tying systems together using the Services module and remote procedure calls.
Views, Nodequeue and CCK are contributed modules, outside of Drupal core, but they are very heavily used in serious Drupal projects. I can't imagine tacking anything complicated without them.
welcome, Paula
Paula, I was in a quite similar position to yours about 18 months ago, in a publishing unit of a membership-based organization, trying to bring our content delivery up to par with the 21st century. I started out knowing next to nothing about Drupal but quickly pulled together a platform and website that has since really revolutionized how we publish content... I think you're going to love Drupal!
One thing that makes Drupal different than other CMSs is that its back-end admin interface has the same look as what the users see on the front end (but, like you suspected, with access to input forms for creating content). Developers commonly override that and set a different theme for admin pages with the Administration Theme module (http://drupal.org/project/admin_theme). This can be handy at times and confusing at other times--really just a matter of preference.
Admin Theme and the features Shyamala mentioned are add-ons. They don't come with core Drupal. Out-of-the box Drupal gives you a website with blog-like capability, but to get from there to something that will meet your demands as a full-scale magazine site, you'll need a handful of add-on modules. I haven't used it myself, but there's a lot of discussion in this group about Open Publish, a distribution of Drupal that comes pre-packaged with most of the add-on modules you'll need to get started with a newspaper or magazine site--it's one of those things I wish I would have known about before getting started with Drupal myself!
Good luck,
Sean
Sean Fitzpatrick
Proof Studio
@sffitzpatrick
Sean, Thanks so much! I'll be
Sean,
Thanks so much! I'll be working through this process over the next several weeks. Hopefully I'll be able to get through much of it without disturbing the Newspaper group too much!;-)
Your help and Shyamala's have already proven invaluable!:-)
Kind regards,
Paula DiTallo, CABM
plditallo@ieee.org
plditallo@metro-design-dev.com
url: www.metro-design-dev.com
ProsePoint
Just wanted to toss out ProsePoint ( www.prosepoint.org ) as the other Drupal-based alternative to OpenPublish. I tried Drupal, OpenPublish, and ProsePoint for a couple of months before deciding that ProsePoint was the best option for the daily newspaper where I work, based on the fact that the majority of our staff are not highly technically-savvy. We've still had to add in a number of other Drupal modules for various features and functionality ... and the tech staff in the media company's IT department (in Las Vegas, on the other side of the country from us) has had to do some tweaking and customization for us. But overall, we've been very pleased.
Katrina
Site builder, writer, trainer, graphic designer