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By theweirdone on
Hello, I'm trying to make a site for my mother.
She wants to start a monthly newspaper to be sent out to her department at work, and I think it would be easiest for her to do if it were a website.
She already has a design (as can be seen here) which she made in publisher, and I was wondering if the best way to make it into a website she would be able to use, would be if I turned it into a Drupal run website.
Is this the best way to do it? Any other suggestions on how to do it?
Comments
> She already has a
> She already has a design
Forget it. If you don't know how to theme in Drupal or any other CMS, why would you even consider not using one of the free, very polished, professional-level themes available? As a beginner, have you any idea how much time and effort it would take you to learn how to turn that publisher layout into a theme? And how bad the website would actually look compared to the other downloadable themes? Take it from one who has tried and failed - start off with a downloadable theme you like, and go from there.
> She wants to start a monthly newspaper to be sent out to her department at work,
> and I think it would be easiest for her to do if it were a website.
To be blunt, no it wouldn't. Creating and running a website with a CMS that is new to you, takes hundreds of hours of research, work and a lot of commitment. After you have learnt the CMS, that workload should decrease a lot for subsequent websites and projects, but the first one is always a killer.
It would be *far* easier just to circulate the publisher document as a pdf attachment using a subscription email mail-list service like yahoo or google provide, or perhaps even by just collecting the email addresses of everyone in her dept manually and using the built-in Outlook mailing-list feature. Also a website would be 'passive' - if you didn't want the website development to become complicated, the dept members would have to visit the website to get the newsletter; a mailing list would be far more 'proactive'.
If you do still want to create a website, and if you planned to have the actual newsletter displayed as drupal content, I would suggest that it is very difficult to make a website for non-tech users (ie. your mum) to use media and formatted text in their contributions whilst protecting them from encountering any html and scripting. I've been trying to get to that stage for a school website; I'm now 400 hours into 'learning Drupal', and still not anywhere near being able to make the site friendly enough for young pupils and non-tech teachers to manage and use media.
One way round this difficulty might be to save the publisher pages as jpg. I did this for a school magazine and used lightbox to display the jpg pages. But it is still quite technical to upload the images and get them to display in lightbox as a 'group'.
HOWEVER, if she just wants to write a post saying 'here is this months newsletter' and then upload the .pub document or a pdf as an attachment to that post, then Drupal will do that fairly simply out of the box. It might be considered overkill to use a CMS for this type of simple document distribution though. I think you are looking at about 20-40 hours work, just for installing and setting Drupal up correctly, and learning how to use the frontpage feature and upload module.
While the answer above is
While the answer above is rather blunt, I am forced to concur.
I have set up several Drupal sites, but have to agree that the learning curve, while rewarding, is steep.
Your mom will be, I think, dramatically more happy with a service like icontact.com ( which I use on a regular basis. Hmm, I should get an affiliate link) or with simply using google groups, depending on the size of the mailing list.
If she or you are willing to make the considerable investment in developing a Drupal site, I am sorry to say that the mailing tools are not super sophisticated. The best in-drupal options are simplenews or a module that provides integration with phplist or mailman. In which case, you still have to do the HTML composing yourself.
Without knowing mum's tech skills (mine literally wrote the book on "Small Computers for the Small Businessman") it's an iffy proposition to set her adrift in the Drupally sea.
In order of ease, I'd consider the following:
1. Google Groups
2. Compose mail and use local program (outlook, etc)
3. icontact or similar for-fee service.
4. Mailman installation
5. PHPlist (actually, I have not used this, so I may be wrong here)
6. Print out on paper and mail it (kidding, but there is something to be said for paper)
7. Drupal site
However, if mum wants a bunch of features, and you are willing to be tech support, go for it!
:)