By jbottero on

I’m wondering if Drupal would be appropriate for a small town (15,000) weekly newspaper’s on-line site? One of the things that concerns me is the menuing system, which I am convinced for a newspaper type needs to be “hierarchical”, and I gather that the default menuing system is not? Ideas, input, comments?

-- Jake Bottero

Comments

Adagio’s picture

Adagio commented

I think this would work nicely with the Taxonomy menu module. It allows you to have taxonomy (category) entries in your menu.

Perhaps you could also get some inspiration from Urban Vancouver.

silverwing’s picture

silverwing commented

Drupal can be very versatile. You're not stuck with just one way to do things. For the menu, there are a few options, including, like suggested, some of the taxonomy_xxx from the download sections. Or you can create your own menu (just a glorified block) and (I think) use javascript for the dhtml style.

You can then set up your taxonomy the way you want it, and include something like the awtags module for added (well, I want to say coolness, but) functionality.

I think it'll be a good bet.

silverwing - starting to sound like a drupal apologist (not that that's such a bad thing ;0)

www.misguidedthoughts.com

adamg@universalhub.com’s picture

adamg@universalhub.com commented

www.blufftontoday.com - is the site for a South Carolina newspaper run by the Morris chain.

One of the thing's that's interesting in that the focus is on the online content, not repurposed print stuff (which is put up only as PDFs).

Linux Journal - It's a trade journal, yes, but they had to deal with a lot of the same integration issues you might face.

Definitely look into heavy use of the taxonomy module. It can be as hierarchical as you want, and all articles can be tagged into it (and tagged for multiple categories.

dublin drupaller’s picture

dublin drupaller commented

thanks for posting that Adam..I'm really impressed with the bluffonttoday site..do you know how they did the frontpage?

Dub

DUBLIN DRUPALLER
___________________________________________________
A drupal user by chance and a dubliner by sheer luck.
Using Drupal to help build Artist & Band web communities.

Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate

pamphile’s picture

pamphile commented

You can use the front_page module...

It will let you select a unique page for anonymous and authenticated users.

First design our unique homepage

Then go to your site settings

Change your Default front page to front_page

You will see the page at http://example.com/front_page and your homepage

http://01debug.com
http://01wholesale.com

dublin drupaller’s picture

dublin drupaller commented

Hi and thanks for the tip..

I meant how they pulled the content from the database for the front page....am (very!) familiar with the front_page.module.

i.e. I like the way they have pulled content into the two column page. Was that just using a mix of php snippets and some inline styles?

http://drupal.org/node/23220

Dub

DUBLIN DRUPALLER
___________________________________________________
A drupal user by chance and a dubliner by sheer luck.
Using Drupal to help build Artist & Band web communities.

Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate

pamphile’s picture

pamphile commented

YEs,

You can mix PHP and HTML code. That means you can also include RSS feeds in whatever area you want. ;)

http://scriptmigration.com - coming very soon -
http://goingtochina.com

milang’s picture

milang commented

I agree with DD, very well done ...

Gunny-1’s picture

Gunny-1 commented

the site has a good integration of gallery with drupal, and also i like the way they pull the weather forecast of different locations.

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

Sorry I missed this thread earlier.

Yes, we use the Front Page module (thanks, DD!) and take much advantage of PHP.

Some of the homepage link clusters are simple include files that are manually managed. Others, such as the event listings, pull in cached HTML snippets that were created by custom PHP scripts that hit the database. The photo gallery chunkettes also are cached for performance reasons and rely on cron processes that hit special G2 URLs, and a lot of string processing to filter out G2 cruft. Movie listings are retrieved from an XML feed produced by proprietary Morris technology, digested with the PEAR XML parser, and rendered as HTML.

There's a lot of custom PHP under the hood but it's all simple stuff. We built the site, from concept to full deployment, in five weeks, with only a couple of us doing the work as we figured out what we wanted the site to be. At the start no one was particularly familiar with Drupal. I wrote nearly all the custom PHP myself, and I'm not a programmer. (I'm a journalist and Internet strategist-theoretician.)

Drupal powers the primary www site; extras.blufftontoday.com runs some proprietary Morris technology; classifieds.blufftontoday.com is all Morris MTL-based commercial software.

Bluffton runs the Drupal registration system. I integrated Drupal with our own Morris registration system for blogs.augusta.com, using the existing webserver auth module as an example and writing some web services queries.

Drupal has been sweet to work with. I wish I could say the same about G2, which has been a series of headaches. We're writing our own PHP-based gallery system to our own specs, based on previous work we did in embedded Perl for spotted.augusta.com, and we'll use our own system for any future launches.

Again, my primary focus isn't on the technology but rather on applying the community interaction model to media sites, helping our newspapers lead a process of rebuilding social capital in our markets. You can get a theoretical grounding here:

http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro/