Legal Friction: Legal News Aggregator with "Digg" Voting
This is my first attempt at creating a Drupal-based website. The site allows users to submit links to legal news, articles, etc. Other users may then vote on the link in a "Digg" fashion.
I used the Zen theme and made a lot of small changes to the CSS to get the look I needed. Most of the kinks are worked out, but a few pop up in IE6. My biggest challenge was with the Vote Up Down Module and its included CSS not displaying consistently on all browsers.
I made the logo, many of the icons, and menu backgrounds in photoshop (including the vote icons - which have hover effects and change colors when you actually vote for a link), and I plan to eventually replace the bullet icons and a few other "standard" images in the zen theme. Of course, including the various images and icons required some modification to the included CSS files. The addition of a second icon (and link) in the header also required modification to the template .php files.
My plans for the site include:
- More graphic work (buttons, icons, etc.)
- Changing the "standard" look of the content in the right column
- Upgrading the VotingAPI module to promote highly ranked content to the front page (don't have the time to debug it if it doesn't work the first time)
- Adding some background gradients to the page and some dividers between the main content and the right column.
I would appreciate feedback on the design. Specifically, I'd love to hear ideas on how I could improve the functionality and look of the site.
I'd be happy to provide more details for anybody that is interested.
Thanks for looking!
Cool!
If this is your first Drupal website, then great job. It doesn't look like a standard CMS site at all. And it looks like you've got a bunch of interesting content going already.
I doubt I'll visit your site, but it looks like a great resource for a very specific audience.
Two comments:
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Thanks
I appreciate your comments. The split between the "all news" and "recent news" menu items is really more of a place holder for the inclusion of the new VotingAPI module which will supposedly allow me to promote content to the front page automatically. In the future, "all news" will display top rated links, and "recent news" (the name may change) will display a list of stories that were submitted within a specific time range and that do not have a specific number of votes.
I like the idea of making the date show up in bold. I would ultimately like a separate title to appear between links submitted within certain ranges of time on the main page. For example, the "title" of the page would say "Today," and then 3-4 stories down, a separate title would say "Yesterday," etc. I may have to find a module that would let me create various views within the main page.
As for the vote links, I'm aware that they don't do anything when you aren't logged in. I have plans to add some php to the Vote Up Down Module to check for a log in status, and if a user is not logged in, Greybox will be called with the log in / registration page inside (or maybe it will just link to that page - not sure yet).
Great idea with remembering what story you were trying to vote on. I'll have to look in to that, too.
Thanks again for the feedback.
Legal News Aggregator
Your site looks good, but I'm wondering how one changes the whole background colour?
Background
Without going into too much detail, you can change the whole background color (or use an image instead of a solid color) by editing the CSS file of the theme. You can then change the individual background colors of different sections (header, sidebar, nodes, forums, etc.) by adjusting the settings within the same CSS file.
Q?
Cool site, how are you turning the aggregated feed items into a node?
A
The content is not actually aggregated from any specific site. Each node is individually submitted by registered users. I've looked into the idea of using the Leech module to create a "queue" of nodes for users to vote on, but at this point, I haven't actually jumped on the idea - although I like the idea of it. So to answer your question, each news item is really just a node that registered users submit to the site.
Updated
I recently incorporated the Leech module into my website. Now, content may be submitted by users or leeched from websites automatically. Once a story gets enough votes, it makes it to the home page. Check it out, and let me know what you think. I'd be happy to answer any questions or provide more information about the setup.
Nice work. Considered
Nice work.
Considered installing Flatforum?
Thanks
I haven't even heard of it until today. I like the idea, and I appreciate the suggestion. I'll look into it. What are some of the benefits of using it?
How do it know?
How are you making your leech feeds look the same as the storylinks? I also can't figure out how to make the leeched article titles link to the actual article (instead of the node). Any help would be great. Your website looks awesome!