By palmergroup on

Recently launched amwordonline.com.

Am word is a student-run bi-monthly online and monthly print magazine on American University's campus. The sections cover entertainment, lifestyle, sports and news. Pages portray Washington, D.C. - and the world - through the eyes of young people, with a focus on American University. It's the "not so square magazine," that offers everyone a voice. We are currently serving 25 articles with 12 student writers.

Website: http://www.amwordonline.com

I'll be happy to answer any questions/comments you may have.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

wow, great site - nice and crisp visually and super easy to get at on first glance.

one specific question: i'm using d6, trying to do the same thing you're doing where there is a 'category' on the home page (say 5 different ones, sports, arts, etc) and show the most recent 2 or 3 'teasers' (without images, and shorter than a typical teaser)...how did you do this? are you using views?

also trying to do the **Exact** same thing in category pages (like opinions) where you show just the teasers without images and constantly update with newest, just as if they were blogs but with truncated views like your site - i must be a nitwit because i can't figure it out in drupal6 (though again i think it's views - or maybe not?)

also - the forums look excellent that way, without any blocks - makes it soooo much easier to keep people inside forums while inside site and gives back screen space...considering something very similar and glad to see how great it looks...

also love that ajax popup registration - is that a mod or custom?

palmergroup’s picture

palmergroup commented

Hi zilla,

Thank you for the comments. Currently, amwordonline.com uses Drupal 5.x. I have developed another website, Festival For Farely, which uses Drupal 6.0; however, it's difficult to develop anything as extensive as amwordonline with Drupal 6.0 because most of the modules haven't been updated.

In regards to amwordonline.com, the "channels" at the top (i.e., the word, entertainment et cetera) are created using the Panels module. I then used various Views blocks to populate each Panel region. And yes, the "recent teasers" you referred to are list Views, which I then altered using custom TPL files.

The opinions page is the same as every other page (e.g., Panels with Views list blocks and custom TPL files); however, it currently doesn't have a feature article nor does it have a Top 5 section (that appears on the lower left under the feature) so it only displays the teaser articles. I've added some php inside the Panels & TPL files to alter the CSS ID if any of the regions have been omitted. That way, if I add a Top 5 or Feature article, the teaser lists will automatically resize and adjust to their proper place.

I used advanced forum and created my own custom theme. I've been meaning to submit it but I need to standardize some of the code so it works with other Drupal themes. It's pretty straight forwards though and a powerful module.

Yes, the registration is a hacked version of the Thickbox module.

bananamuffin’s picture

bananamuffin commented

Thanks for sharing your site and the details. I am still new to Drupal so I'm trying to learn all I can. I assume you created your own theme for this? At the top right where you have "You are not logged in...", how did you get that text to be at the corner there? Sorry if the question sounds silly.

palmergroup’s picture

palmergroup commented

That is actually a DIV hard-coded directly into my page.tpl.php file. I set it with an IF condition, which changes the text when the user is logged in.

In terms of CSS, that's merely positioned relatively within my header region.

bananamuffin’s picture

bananamuffin commented

Nice. I can't wait till I know enough to do different things like that on my sites. Thanks for sharing!

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http://progblogs.com - A directory of programmers and for programmers

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

hah, i was just trying to get a quick visual on my own site to throw categories into the home page with content controls (most recent 5 articles by category) and did it with aggregator blocks....low budget but does the trick...but do you think using aggregator will cripple things? i mean, i can't run the updates every minute or the site will slow down, but every few hours is also tough (maybe)...and pushing out the http request is also just kind of a tedious way to do it, you know?

also, and this is just personal opinion _ the forums make little sense on your site! you already have comments going on around each article, which is in itself a forum - so having a 'per channel' forum setup is a detractor, like redundant and pulls away from article dialogues...

...but the other forums make more sense, and they should be perhaps broadened - these are students, so maybe reviews of local clubs, pubs, scenes and so on (e.g. what's good in foggy bottom [yeah, i lived in dc for a while]) or whatever...but more specifically, reviews of programs and professors and stuff like that...

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

that photo site looks outstanding = is that gallery2?

palmergroup’s picture

palmergroup commented

Hm, that doesn't sound ideal to me but it may work. Are you doing this because you're unable to use Views, CCK et cetera? You may want to consider developing in Drupal 5.x if you've just started developing your website. It seems like it will be a few months before all the useful modules are in place for Drupal 6.0.

In regards to Festival For Farley, the flash gallery isn't actually a Drupal module. It's a 3rd party script which I integrated with Drupal. It's called SimpleViewer and can be found here: http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/.

As for your comments on the forum, I agree. We actually don't have a use for the forum at the moment and I added those because I wanted to display what the forum would look like with threads in multiple containers.

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

yup, only doing it because views/cck won't be ready for a little while - the site itself will be in build mode for at least 8 weeks or so, so i'm really doing it now just to see how the display and navigation feels and then i can rebuild later on...but it's also a very easy quick and dirty way to do this and looks fine in certain themes (though limits utility and customizations obviously)

i figure most of this stuff will at least be in dev mode soon because the devs are working hard to get it ready for drupalcon next month - and obviously drupal6 without cck, OG and views is a tough sell!!!! a lot of people won't even touch it without these things...

as for that gallery, would you mind posting detailed instructions on how you did it exactly? did you use this set of directions:
http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/manual_instruct.html - doesn't make total sense to me...

i'm using the image filter for drupal6 and it's awesome, but the viewing interface on the farley site is just really, really nice...

as for forums, you might want to consider a simple 'new to campus' forum to get things rolling - and perhaps make up questions under fake alias accounts and answer them and so on to get hte ball rolling (e.g. 'how much is a cab to adams morgan?' or 'how do i get student discounts to national gallery' and so on) - a "new to campus/AU" type of forum - then you could simply ping freshman to ask questions ;)

for example, fake account jim asks, "if AU is mostly women, how come i can't get any dates" and fake account julie says, "because you're ugly. just because there are a bunch of us doesn't mean you're shooting fish in a barrel."

JMowery’s picture

JMowery commented

I really like the site.

I had a question. Does the "Post to front page" option do anything special on the site? I had been making a site of my own, and in the end, I'm not sure if I'll even need to use the "Post to front page" option. Just wondering what you did with it. Disable it entirely?

Thanks, and again... great work!

palmergroup’s picture

palmergroup commented

Very good question. I don't use it but I can't remember exactly why. It must have something to do with Views but nonetheless, I created my own CCK "frontpage" button. Here is an image of my standardized submit form: http://img253.imageshack.us/my.php?image=submitformsz7.png

This form essentially handles all article submissions. Here's a basic outline of some of the features that may not be self-explanatory:

Section: Determines which section it goes in (i.e., The Word, Entertainment et cetera).
Article Status: Determines if the article is a feature, list (these are the teasers on each page), thumbnail (these are on the frontpage on the left side, or a combination of the three.
Image position: This was a rather unique addition. I created my own TPL file for this node and made it so that depending on which checkbox was checked (i.e., left, center, right) the images and article structure would change. Interestingly, there is a module now for 6.0 that does just this.
Frontpage: This checkbox determines whether the article is displayed on the frontpage or not.

I also have the ability to insert video, sound, and additional images.