Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.
By geoffb on
We've been live since the beginning of November after migrating from a Coldfusion system.
We're an alternative weekly newspaper from Vancouver, Canada.
We have over 20,000 archives articles with custom modules to display sections by issue.
Check us out at http://www.straight.com
Any suggestions or criticisms happily received.
Geoff
Comments
Advertising?
If it's a form of an ad, is this allowed?
It's the Drupal Showcase
...you're supposed to post about your Drupal-based site. It's always great to hear more details -- kind of like a mini-case study.
...
Though many often like to see more details about modules used and other interesting stuff about why they choose Drupal and such but most don't do that much. :) On that note, I've updated the forum description to mention it.
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Thanks for changing the forum description
Thanks for changing the forum description Steven.
I actually went to some other posts to see what others were saying to indroduce their sites and tried to follow that mainly because, just a few weeks ago, I introduced myself on the newspapers-on-drupal group and was told that rather than mentioning some of the interesting stuff about why we choose Drupal, I should limit comments to descriptions of released Drupal modules.
Geoff
...
Posts in the Showcase forum tend to range from 'this is my new site'(default theme) to 'extensive write up on modules used' (more complex site) to 'how we're using Drupal on our spiffy new site'(pro team developed).
All have value in some way or another. People who implement Drupal range in skill level and industry tremendously. We have IT Professionals, web developers, home hobbyists, non profits and major business efforts. This leads to sites that people figured out how to implement Drupal instead of their own html stuff and they are proud how their site is so improved and what they've accomplished. Then the other spectrum, those IT industry folks who do the full out pro themer, site architecture, design guys with custom modules. All of these folks have something to be proud of when they finish their site and the urge to share is great.
Nothing wrong with your post, people's interest varies when they look at a Drupal site. Some want to know what modules (most common probably), how you did a shiny theme (next up), to why you chose Drupal (looking for arguments to help them withtheir boss :).
Nothing wrong with mentioning custom modules/solutions you came up with to better match/leverage to your needs and add value to your site. It helps give people the thought to reach beyond the current contributed module base at times.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
RE: Georgia Straight
It's great to see other local companies switching to Drupal! I'm also a fan of the Georgia Straight which is really nice. Nice work Geoff, the site looks great.
-theo (http://www.uberjobs.com)
Georgia Straight Question
Geoff:
I'm quite curious how your site works? Do you take a dump from the main Georgia Straight database every day or week and clone the content?
-theo
Unlimited FREE Job Posting
http://www.uberjobs.com
Still quite a manual process
Theo,
The process we have for updating the site is still quite manual due to our newspaper production process.
Essentially, each week we extract the newspaper content from the newspaper's Adobe InDesign layouts via an InDesign script that converts the text to XHTML (we map the InDesign styles to XML tags). This gets manually copied into the entry screen for our Full Article (CCK content type that includes section taxonomy, article contributor name and activation and expiry dates). We expect to automate this as much as we can as soon as we can.
Djun Kim, a Drupal consultant here in Vancouver helped us port old content from our previous home-grown Coldfusion-IIS-MSSQL Server and map old content ids to new Dupal nodes. He also created an Issue and Section module to display articles for a given issue and section. And, he helped us mesh our open-source phpAdsNew ad server with Drupal's Banner module so we could serve ads.
We generally upload images from the newspaper in bulk using the img_assist module as well as individually with the image module for images not in the paper.
We have also built a Classifieds module to import and display ads from a third-party order-entry system.
Other 4.7 modules we are currently using are: excerpt, forward, googlesearch (because our Drupal site search doesn't seem to work with our Full Article CCK content type), gsitemap, pathauto, poll, print, survey (for our contests although we will rewrite this), urlfilter and views.
Geoff