By sinmao on

Wopular screenshot

Wopular is a news aggregation site. I wanted to create an online newspaper rack, showing the top 5 headlines from the top 30 newspapers. I also wanted the ability to highlight interesting and/or important stories and insert corresponding pictures with them. I've always wondered what being a newspaper editor would be like, and this allows me to play that role in spite of my poor writing skills.

By listing five stories from the top circulated newspapers in the country, I'm hoping that this will give a more comprehensive view of what's happening across the United States. Even if most papers cover the same story, it's good to have multiple perspectives. Think of this as Drudge Report meets Rotten Tomatoes.

"... presents breaking news in a slick user-friendly interface that makes The Drudge Report look positively 20th century."

— Anne Thompson, Deputy Editor of Variety.com

Most of the sources are newspapers, but I also link to social news sites like Digg, Google News, and Yahoo! Buzz to show popular news items submitted by their respective users. The Onion and Fark, two news sites focusing on humor are included as well. Sources are sorted by popularity (online news sites) and circulation (newspapers).

Why create another news aggregation site when there are already plenty out there, like the Drudge Report and Huffington Post? First, each of our site's focus is slightly different, and each editor has a different sensibility. It's these slight differences that makes each site unique and, hopefully, allow it to capture its own audience.

History & Platform

Originally, I had wanted to build Wopular with vBulletin. Even though my php/mysql skills were only elementary, I was thinking about writing my own php parser that would create a new forum thread for each headline. As I researched the parser, I found that one had already been written for phpBB. Unfortunately, it didn't work with the latest version, which had some features I needed at the time. I did more research that finally lead me to Drupal and the Aggregation module, which created a node for every story in a feed - exactly what I needed. Still, I wasn't convinced because even after reading all the literature on Drupal, I couldn't quite figure out what it did. I finally went with it when my friend launched EndofBoredom with Drupal and cleared everything up for me. That's how Wopular became my first Drupal site.

Drupal 5 or 6?

When I first started looking into Drupal, which was around February 2008, Drupal 6 was still brand spanking new. The modules I wanted to use - Aggregation, Panels, and Views - weren't available for it yet, so I decided to use version 5 instead. Even now, Aggregation and Panels are still in beta. As soon as those modules are out of beta, I'll upgrade to version 6 - looking forward to the speed improvements and simplified theme system.

Design

Wopular screenshot: Mini-Newspaper
Since the focus is news, I wanted the site to look like a newspaper. I wanted four columns with the same width initially, but backed out of it because a 300x250 ad would be too big to fit in one of those columns. It fits perfectly in a three-column design with a screen width of 1000 pixels.

I wanted each feed to look like a mini-newspaper, so when they're stacked they would resemble a newspaper rack. I saw a design in a newspaper I liked (scroll down to the middle of the page, middle column), and just used that as a guideline to make it look more like a mini-newspaper for Wopular. For colors, I didn't want to stray to far from Drupal's default scheme; this was my first Drupal site, and CSS was still new to me.

"VERY nice implementation, clean, simple, valuable."

— Nick Demartino, Senior Vice President of American Film Institute

Modules

I ended up using just four modules:

Aggregation was used to create nodes for each feed item, which the core aggregator wasn't able to do. I chose this module over the others because it was the first RSS module I came across that I could understand and did what I wanted. It has performance tweaks, which was helpful. I can adjust the time between each feed and the number of feeds to process per cron job. Because Wopular was processing hundreds of feeds, I had to space them out (a couple seconds between each feed) during cron. When I launched the site, I made the mistake of processing all of them at once and crashed the servers at my isp on a weekly basis. Luckily, my ISP was very understanding :)

I had three types of Views. The first type was used to generate the featured stories for each menu section on the left column of the home page, which had both titles and teasers. The second was similiar to the first except there's no section (you can see an example of this in the middle column of the homepage). The third generated the list of headlines for each news source in the Full News Rack tab. Originally, I created a view for each source - about 550 sources total - and that kinda killed the module. It would take a couple minutes just to load up whenever I tried to edit a view and another couple minutes when I submitted. Fortunately, I learned how to use Views Arguments and replaced 550 views to just a handful.

(From left to right: Views Type 1, 2, and 3)
Wopular screenshot: Views Type #1

Panels was used for the three column layout. This was most useful for stacking the newspapers one on top of the another within each column. You can insert Blocks, Views, Nodes, and even custom content into Panel columns. For wopular, I mostly used Views and custom content ("What is Wopular" box). When a view is inserted into a column in Panels, I can configure certain views attributes within Panels. It was convenient that Views was well integrated within Panels.

CCK was used to create custom image link fields for each feed item. Once the custom field was created, it was available in each feed item. Then I manually grabbed the image urls from highlighted news sources. I plan to use this module a lot more in the future.

Custom Module

Wopular screenshot: Views Type #1

A custom module was created to display each news source in a three column format (ex. CNN) - or if you prefer Digg. It's a very simple module. All it does is query the database for the last 30 or so articles from a news source and divy them up into three blocks, one for each column. I originally wanted to create a function on template.php to accomplish this, but couldn't get Panels to access it. I learned from the forums that a custom module was the way to go. That was good, because I had wanted to learn how to do that anyway.

Performance

I had to reluctantly shut down pathauto, xml sitemap, related links, and search modules because of performance issues. Because I had about 500 feeds, about 300,000 nodes were generated each month. Those modules were probably not created with that kind of quantity in mind. I have shared hosting, and my site was crashing the server every other day with those modules. Each of those modules alone was very resource intensive. They're great for SEO, but that's not gonna be any use to me if the site's not accessable. They're awesome modules though, and I do plan to use them again in the future once I figure out the performance issues.

The Future

I plan to make incremental additions/improvements to the site. One of the first priorities is to upgrade to Drupal 6 when Aggregation and Panels get out of beta stage. I've started tagging featured articles recently and wanted to make better use of that feature by turning them into sub-menus/navigation. I also want to tinker some more with the disabled modules to figure out the performance issues. The Full News Rack pages take a while to load, so I might break them up into small pages with sub-categories. There are other modules that I might want to explore, like Drigg and some of the social networking tools. That's the great thing about Drupal and its community - there are lots of possibilities and people are happy to provide a helping hand. One of the things I've wanted to accomplish with Wopular is to learn new development skills, and this is a great platform and community to do that with.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

very nice work - you may want to check out page caching as the site loads a bit slowly (and i'm on fios!!)

any interest in writing up a simple sort of tutorial? this would be an outstanding case study in an aggregation site using minimal modules if you had the time or interest...

........................................................................
i love to waste time: http://twitter.com/passingnotes

droople’s picture

droople commented

Nothing diverts you from the news. SIte does exactly as the slogan states.

The design is flawless in my opinion.

Is this a hobby site? Or it's commercial. If it's commercial how is it making money? What are the arrangements with the original news sources?

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Thanks Droople,

It's a hobby site for now. No arrangements were made with other sites. It just grabs their rss feeds and each story links directly to them.

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Thanks, zilla.

Caching is on, but you're probably one of the first to visit the page :) I also use the images from the sites I link to and sometimes they take time to load.

Sure, I'll work on a tutorial in the next day or so.

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

History

I wanted to create an online newspaper rack, showing the top 5 headlines from the top 30 or so newspapers. I also wanted to ability to highlight interesting and/or important stories and have the ability to insert pictures with those headlines.

Platform

Originally, I had wanted to build Wopular with vBulletin. Even though my php/mysql skills were only elementary, I was thinking about writing my own php parser that would create a new forum thread for each headline. As I researched the parser, I found that one had already been written for phpBB. Unfortunately, it didn't work with the latest version, which had some features I needed at the time. I did more research that finally lead me to Drupal and the Aggregation module, which creates a node for every story in a feed - exactly what I needed. Still, I wasn't convinced because even after reading all the literature on Drupal, I couldn't quite figure out what it does. I finally went with it when my friend launched www.EndofBoredom.com with Drupal and cleared everything up for me. That's how Wopular became my first Drupal site.

Design

Since the focus is news, I wanted the site to look like a newspaper. I wanted four columns with the same width initially, but backed out of it because a 300x250 ad would be too big to fit in one of those columns. It fits perfectly in a three-column design with a screen width of 1000 pixels.

I wanted each feed to look like a mini-newspaper, so when they're stacked they would resemble a newspaper rack. I saw a design in a newspaper I liked (scroll down to the middle of the page, middle column), and just touched it up to look more like a mini-newspaper for Wopular. For colors, I didn't want to stray to far from Drupal's default scheme; this was my first Drupal site, and CSS was still new to me.

Modules

I ended up using just four modules - Aggregation to create nodes for each feed item, Panels for the three column layout, Views to generate list of feeds and featured stories, and ccK for the image links.

Performance

I had to shut down pathauto, xml sitemap, related links, and search modules because of performance issues. Because I have about 500 feeds, about 300,000 nodes are generated each month. I don't think those modules were created with that kind of quantity in mind. I have shared hosting, and my site was crashing the server every other day with those modules.

Lessons

If you're using aggregation with hundred's of feeds, be sure to space them out and not run them all at once. Your site will be more stable.

If you're new to Views, lean to use Arguments. It'll lessen the number of views you'll have to create. I made the mistake of creating one view for each feed, which was about 500 views. Well, Views wasn't meant to do that either. Whenever I edit a view, the site would be out for two minutes.

navinjathan’s picture

navinjathan commented

Excellent site.. and an excellent case log too Sinmao.. hats off!!

All4data’s picture

All4data commented

Hi sinmao, a fantastic job you have done and I hope to be able to replicate something similar for my overall portal.

You mentioned vBulletin forums and I was wondering whether you had tried www.vbdrupal.org to achieve the opening of a thread in the forums after a news item is created, as that seems pretty standard with vBdrupal

Wonderful stuff

A4D

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Thanks All4data,

I came across vbdrupal during my research too. I ended up not trying it because, at the time, I could barely figure out what Drupal was, I would have needed to buy another vB license, and the two versions used for vbdrupal weren't that recent.

You could try it, and let us know what you think :)

ScoutBaker’s picture

ScoutBaker commented

I like the site, and thanks for the write-up. It's especially refreshing because it is not a large, complicated recipe to deliver the results. A great example for new users looking to see what they can do.

---
"Nice to meet you Rose...run for your life." - The Doctor
My first public Drupal site - EyeOnThe503

frankaltea’s picture

frankaltea commented

The site looks and feels easy to use and the idea is great.

There are so many things going on around the world and each individual wants to read from different sources.
What a great idea.

This is a fine example of why I think Drupal has been designed properly. You used only 4 modules. That's Great Design!

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Thanks Frank,

Yeah, it's kinda like sculpting. I first started with a bunch of modules, and then I started chipping them away for performance.

frankaltea’s picture

frankaltea commented

I'm still new with Drupal and I was wondering,

How was the menu produced?

Thanks. I use your site everyday now to check the news.

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Hi Frank,

Thanks for checking out the site everyone!

The tabbed menu is created thru CSS. If you're using garland, theme, open up page.tpl.php, you should see a variable named $secondary_links (or if you prefer to style the main menu, $primary_links). You don't really need to do much with it except move it to wherever you want it to appear on the page. Afterwards, go to style.css, and play around with the classes.

idflorin’s picture

idflorin commented

I made my small copy of your site. It's nothing special, it's just a test, it has around 50 rss sources:
Weblogs newsrack
What do you think ?

socialtalker’s picture

socialtalker commented

dang, i am jealous! i came across lots of stories i have yet to read about. you should consider an rss feed button.
was it very difficult keeping the pictures and the stories together? i have yet to use aggregation.

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Hi Socialtalker,

Thanks for the suggestion. RSS feed button is on my to do list. I use CCK to create an extra field for the image url, which I grab manually from the original articles.

Solari’s picture

Solari commented

I really like it. I'm curious how you were able to incorporate images in the headline pages since most of the RSS feeds you're pulling from don't seem to have images in them. How are you doing it?

Thanks,
Ray

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Hi Solari,

It's a manual process. I created an image field for each node with CCK. For featured nodes that I want to give an extra highlight to, I'll either grab the image from the original article or search their site for an appropriate image. If all else fails, I'll just grab one from Google Image.

Solari’s picture

Solari commented

I noticed more often than not, though, that RSS feeds include images. I imagine your system could pull them in if it detects them?

Ray

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

It could, but only when you're viewing the node. Also, it's very unreliable, and most feeds that I use actually don't include images.

blinkinnovation’s picture

blinkinnovation commented

this is excellent, well done. beautifully simple, just the information. looking forward to reading your tutorial, thanks for writing it and good luck with future projects - will be watching! Cheers

seanray’s picture

seanray commented

This site is excellent.

askandlearn’s picture

askandlearn commented

This is a really nice job. Congratulations.

Are you concerned that the original content providers will come after you and sue? Once you put ads on the site it will be commercial. I understand it is similar to the Google News site, but there are no ads on Google News.

I'm probably woefully behind the times in thinking that publishers are still pursuing people who republish their content. Is it still an issue?

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Hi,

Thanks!

I think as long as you link back to them directly, and you only grab a teaser (a sentence or two), then you're ok under fair use. If you think about it, search engines are the same - they grab the title of your webpage and a teaser sentence. I also make sure that when it's a feed, only a teaser sentence is shown even if the feed itself contains the entire article.

Personally, I think you cross the line when you do what the HuffingtonPost.com does - they grab a couple paragraphs, put that on a separate page called "Quick Read", and stick an ad in there. I still don't understand how they could get away with that.

jkb.szew’s picture

jkb.szew commented

I'm afraid you must be careful and for example you should soon remove some feeds if you want to put the ads here. Why?

http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/index.html - NY Times allows non=commercial use of their feeds only

http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/answer.py?answer=59255&hl=en - Google News allows non=commercial use only as well

I understand you are playing fair with the newspapers, and you don't any charm to them, but there are many bad people who have more money and want to destroy potential concurrence ASAP.

I hope we can once clear that issue out, so that it will be clear when any Drupal user would touch aggregation modules knowing how they can use it with other feeds.

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

I think you're safe as long as you're linking back directly and not repacking their content and selling it to other companies. New York Times does the same thing with one of their local sites. They take RSS feeds from local alternative papers and aggregated all under one site. I forgot the name of it though. If they're doing it, I think it's probably ok.

dindon’s picture

dindon commented

Excellent!!!!
mind to share your theme?

TIA

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Dindon,

I'm open to it if anyone can point me to directions on how to do that :)

Senpai’s picture

Senpai commented

You mean instructions like these? http://drupal.org/handbook/cvs/projects & http://drupal.org/node/262432 :-)
______________________________
Senpai

****
Joel "Senpai" Farris | certified to rock score

tianhaobo’s picture

tianhaobo commented

nice work

very very excellent

iimitk’s picture

iimitk commented

Very clean & simple layout, yet it's admirably charming. Well done.

Only one question, any good reason why you've used Drupal 5 instead of Drupal 6 for building the site?
________________________
"Creativity is knowing how to hide your resources" - Albert Einstein.

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Thanks, Mr. T. When I first started looking into it, which was around Feb 2008, Drupal 6 was still fairly new. Aggregation, Panels, and Views for D6 were still in development. I can't believe it's been about a year already.

domineaux’s picture

domineaux commented

Why don't you have the site spaced to center on larger monitors

I have a 24" monitor and it is dead set against the left side of my screen

You may have said it and I missed it. Your pictures all look to be 293wide x XXX tall.

It would appear you are using some type of auto cropping tool, because some of the images are cropped rather strange looking.

Between menu tabs your site pages load too slow.

I'm on a cable connection, which is fast.

I'd say your site is definitely for broadband users.

I like the site, and you do have a good assortment of news items displayed.

It maybe a requirement to link to the original news items site, but I would sure think about linking to those sites with an iframe.

It doesn't make sense to spend all the effort to build such a good site, and off your visitors go to another site with first clickon.

An iframe should keep your header and menu for sure.

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Hi Domineaux,

Thanks for the suggestions and comments. I did wanted to center the site originally, but my CSS skills weren't up to snuff yet, so I just flushed it to the left. I have a height limit on the images because I think it looks neater that way. The framing issue is sensitive. Sites hate being framed, and there have been many lawsuits in the past.

domineaux’s picture

domineaux commented

Maybe there is a workaround on the iframes issue.

You might get away with a small header and suckerfish menu, if you're worried about lawsuit.

I'd be willing to bet any legal problems wtih iframes have been the result of claiming the information as proprietary to their own site.

Regardless, in most situations I say a legal case against an RSS site being iframed would not have much merit for collecting any damages.

In fact, I really don't see how it would be enforceable.

The reason I say that is... the news sites put up RSS XML for linking to them.

They put out the information for you to link to them... so you link to them, but you assure your users remain on your site.

They may have an agreement, but I seriously doubt if you were represented by an attorney that could stop you from iframes.

One thing I have learned. It isn't as easy to win a lawsuit as it is to bring one. LOL

I wouldn't link to anyone that wouldn't let me hold my users to my site.

People violate copyrights and so-called agreements all over the web all the time.

Youtube is a perfect example.

Do you think all those CNN, MSNBC, FOX clips from news broadcasts have been released?

In other words, I would risk iframing content sites and keep a low key header with a son of suckerfish menu for accessing my site.

People are scared to death of lawyers. Most people fold when they get a letter or get threatened by a lawsuit.

One thing you might keep in mind about lawyers... they love to settle.

By that I mean you can continue to test the water until you draw some blood, not just a letter or some other legal nonsense.

The lawyers will always come back several times, because they want to get paid by their client.

They don't want to waste time on some website owner that is running a website that makes zero to a few bucks a month off ads, etc.

Lawyers don't want to waste their time on lawsuits that will yield them nothing.

The lawyers will work on you with letters to get money from their clients

The lawyers will always advise their clients to walk away unless their client is being seriously damaged.

So... I say iframe them sites, full speed ahead.

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

I agree with you that the law should be on the side of the framers, but, so far, framers tend to lose in these cases. The rule of thumb with framing is to do it only if you have the permission from the website you're trying to frame. The exception is if you're Google - I think they won the right to frame other sites with Google Images.

When Google bought YouTube, $600 million was reserved to fight copyright lawsuits. I don't have $600M :)

peterx’s picture

peterx commented

The site looks good on this screen. Your description of four versus three columns is useful.

I selected a few links and enjoyed reading the site until I hit those indirect links. One of the reasons for leaving Google to visit a news aggregation site is that Google links to blog entries that then link to the real article, or through to another blog that may link to the real article. I will stick to aggregation sites that aggregate news articles, not second hand links.

You mention performance problems with pathauto, xml sitemap, and related links. I am interested in finding out what causes the performance problems because all three modules are on my todo lists for various sites. If anyone has analyzed the performance problems, please describe the causes. We could start a performance topic for each moldule.

petermoulding.com/web_architect

petermoulding.com/web_architect

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Peterx, good point about indirect links. Regarding those three SEO modules, performance only start to break down when there are hundreds of thousands of nodes. I haven't had much time to tinker with them; I installed everything and started taking down one module after another until the site was stable. Also, I'm using shared hosting, so I'm not sure how they would perform with a dedicated server.

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Hi Peterx,

Actually, I re-enabled pathauto and xmlsitemap. So far so good. I think my problem before pathauto and xmlsitemap is because I set the aggregation module to update all of the feeds at once instead of spacing them apart.

With pathauto, I ended up spending 3-4 hours (while watching the nba all-star game) batch processing nodes in 9000 chunks until every node was done. With xmlsitemap, I restricted it to just taxonomy.

I'll have to play around with related links until I find a workable performance.

minesota’s picture

minesota commented

There are some "racks" which are empty when I saw it [http://www.wopular.com/home/full_news_rack] for example Baltimore Sun , Portland Oregonian, Charlotte Observer and a few more

Can it be done that when there are no feeds that particular block does not show up at all ?
That will be visually more nice :)

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Hi Minesota,

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll see what I can do about that, although the advantage of having empty racks is that I can see which feeds are broken.

jinlong’s picture

jinlong commented

great work. best for you!

themegarden.org’s picture

themegarden.org commented

Great job done and really nice site.
Design of your drupal theme is very attractive.

And of course, thanks for this article.

---
Drupal Theme Garden

bwv’s picture

bwv commented

Great job, congrats. May I please ask: did you consider using the simplefeed module? With aggregation links set up the way they are on your site, it is not clear to me to what degree a search index will be able to find the news you are collecting on your site. On the other hand, simplefeed (and feedAPI, presumably) add more modules and both use more resources in terms of database space. Just curious about what, if any, trade-offs you considered/made during the course of development. Also, if you would be so kind as to supply (in 125,000 words or less) how you employed Arguments, I am certain you would earn the gratitude of multitudes. :-) Best, david
----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://classicvinyl.biz
http://music.classicvinyl.biz
http://association.drupal.org/user/1207

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Hi David,

Search engines can crawl thru the "Talk" links. Yeah, I know there are only teasers there, but it's better than nothing. Hopefully, once there are enough users, those pages will be filled with comments :) I haven't tinkered with any of the other feed modules yet, but I do plan to test out Simplefeed and FeedAPI for some features in the future.

Since most of the Views on Wopular are the same except for the nid of the feed, I use the Arguments field in Views to make the feed nid adjustable. Once that's done, an arguments input box is made available in Panels. So now, all I have to do for each of the racks is supply the feed nid in Panels.

So in summary:

- Install Aggregation and create a feed.
- Go to Views and create a view called "News" (or anything you like).
- In "News" view, you should see a section called "Arguments".
- Go to the "Add Argument" dropdown and you should see a field called "Aggregation: Parent Feed Node ID". Add it.
- Go to Panels, in the "Choose a view from the views module:" dropdown, add "News" view to one of the columns.
- Click on "Configure" and you should see "Views Arguments".
- Now all you have to do is stick in the Node ID of the feed.

So now you have just one View to accommodate as many feeds as you want.

bwv’s picture

bwv commented

Thank you, that is very helpful.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://classicvinyl.biz
http://music.classicvinyl.biz
http://association.drupal.org/user/1207

taxslayer’s picture

taxslayer commented

I loved that minimalist design, fast loading and upto the point. However i would still look at rewriting those urls as proper descriptive title and .html if possible.

You would be loosing 50-70% traffic by not using pathauto. Leave the fancy stuffy aside and concentrate on getting the traffic. Without the audience the site would be useless isnt it? Dont let it happen to this otherwise excellent site.

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Will definitely enable that module again once I resolve the performance issues.

saltcod’s picture

saltcod commented

I think the idea here is great, and it seems to be executed very well ......and although I hate to be critical.... sorry.....there's something about the site that doesn't 'draw me in'.

I think that an hour's worth of CSS work could make the site shine. I think some of the elements from http://nymag.com/ could really spruce things up. IE: a splashy header, less gradients....etc....

More specifically: 16-18px Georgia for the headlines, #555 in colour, solid backgrounds for the blocks and navigation, etc....

I wish I could attach a screenshot - I just changed some css with Firebug and in about 5 minutes I'm finding the site much more welcoming......

but again - I hate to be critical, but this site has some excellent functionality, and I think some extra umph could really liven things up. If you want the screenshot I've made, use the contact function.

Keep up the great work!

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Hi Saltcod,

I just emailed you for the screenshot. Thanks for taking the time to do that. I'll see what I can incorporate.

James125’s picture

James125 commented

Nice work!

hectorplus’s picture

hectorplus commented

Neat work indeed, the layout is elegant.

gorcon’s picture

gorcon commented

Yet another website someone thought of before me. :)

Very well done.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

this is a fast-speed shared hosting, where is it? i bet it's not dreamhost. i recently moved my drupal from dreamhost to linode but linode's disk space is a bit limited for me, though the speed is improved.

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Hi Xxiao,

I enabled caching on the site (every hour), so unless you're the first person to hit the site, it should be pretty fast. I use he.net. They're very responsive and helpful. In the past, I used Nexcess.net. They're very good too - and cheap! I decided to go with he.net because it's local. You never know when that might come in handy.

nirad’s picture

nirad commented

Great site. The only areas I think need improvement are the "talk" comments section and the use of taxonomy. First, the CSS design in these section seems like it doesn't match the design of the rest of your site. This is probably pretty easy to fix; it's mostly just fonts. The comment section doesn't seem to draw you in- perhaps you need to add something else, like the ability to vote on comments, or the ability to be a logged-in user with a profile & picture when commenting. Getting lively discussions going and allowing people to express themselves is the best way to get people to spend more time on the site.

When you click on the "talk" link to view the comments section, you see that there are tags for stories. But the tag view doesn't give you much to work with- just a chronological list of stories with that tag, and it doesn't emulate the look & feel of the "racks". Why not expand on this to allow users to do a deeper navigation of the site?

-Nirad

-Nirad

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Hi Nirad,

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm actually working on the talk pages and better usage of taxonomy currently. User profiles and community features scare me a little cuz they're huge resource hogs; I'll wait until the site is fully optimized before I get into that.

3lite’s picture

3lite commented

I love the concept. It sort of something that google news is doing now.

Shyamala’s picture

Shyamala commented

Awesome concept and a cool website. Pleasing layout and colours. The inner pages do take time to load, have you enabled Performance -> Normal caching?!

Shyamala
Technology Head - Drupal Competency Center
Netlink Technologies Ltd.
http://shyamala-drupal.blogspot.com/

Shyamala
http://www.unimitysolutions.com

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Thanks Shyamala,

I do have caching on (every hour), but, unfortunately, you're probably the first one to access those pages in that hour. For users visiting the site after you, it'll be pretty fast :)

DigitalDaz’s picture

DigitalDaz commented

Hi, are your view 3 titles panel titles and if they are how did you manage to link them to feed URL, love the site BTW.
TIA

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Hi DigitalDaz,

Yes, they are panel titles. I had to hack the Panels module in order to do this. It's a simple hack. I just went into the file (panels/content_types/views.inc) that was responsible for generating the title, and just replace it with a link. The name of the function in that file is theme_panels_content_views($content, $title).

DigitalDaz’s picture

DigitalDaz commented

That's just cool, I have only used Drupal since Friday and wondered as a noob how hard it would be to replicate it, using UK rather than US. I think I'm doing quite well so far. I'm using Feedapi as I couldn't find a way in the Aggregation module to link to the external url in table or list view.

I'm having an error with the cron job locking up at the moment but that looks like a Feedapi problem.

I managed to get rid of the breadcrumb bar last night from the garland theme, that was interesting and took some time.

This is a steep but fun learning curve! Keep up the good work this is an excellent experience to learn from.

Now to work out how to make some of those nice tabs you have because the tabs module doesn't seem to work anything like that!

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Regarding tabs, it's mostly just tweaking CSS.

Michelle’s picture

Michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

Why would you hack the module to change a theme function?! The whole point of theme functions is that you can override them...

Michelle

--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

DigitalDaz’s picture

DigitalDaz commented

Michelle, I'm gonna have a read of your site too but my problem at the moment is finding documentation, any good links would be well appreciated.

Michelle’s picture

Michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

My site won't help you with that but there is a ton of documentation on the theme system. Overriding theme functions is a pretty fundamental thing that it's in your best interest to get familiar with. You never want to hack core and only very rarely other peoples' modules (and that's only if they don't provide adaquate theme functions, and then you want to file a patch).

Michelle

--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Very true. Will figure out how to override theme functions.

idflorin’s picture

idflorin commented

you got some errors here http://www.wopular.com/home/full_news_rack.
congratulations for this great site.
-----------------------
jabulela

saurabh.bhambry’s picture

saurabh.bhambry commented

Hi ,

Congratuations on putting a brilliant idea to such good use. For one I really do find your website really useful and do sincerely hope that it hits off real well real soon :-).

That apart, like you even I am new to Drupal and still in the experimentation phase. I was curious to know which theme did you use for your website and did you change the main menu of the site ? If yes , then knowing how you did dat would be a big help. Because even I wish to put in place a simple menu for the primary links in my website like the one in your site.

Thanks for your help and inspiring newbies like me to keep at work. :-)

Bhambry

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

It's the garland theme with modifications. The main menu is not that hard to change. Just find $primary_links in page.tpl.php. Move that to a location you want, and then just modify the CSS in style.css.

DigitalDaz’s picture

DigitalDaz commented

Could you tell me please which file to dig into to change the output for a story, I'm meaning like the "read more" "original article" etc. I also want the original article to open in a seperate window which I see you have successfully done.

TIA

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Hi Tia,

It's in the node.tpl.php file. It's in the $links variable. Here's what I did to make that happen:

// Add target="_blank" attribute to original article link
$node->links['agregation_original_url']['attributes']['target'] = "_blank";
$links = $node->links;
$links = theme('links', $links);
print $links;
DigitalDaz’s picture

DigitalDaz commented

Thanks, its the bits like 'agregation_original_url' that I have been trying to find but I think I have a tool to do that now, already I am now thinking of pulling down a Joomla site I have and redoing it in Drupal.

saurabh.bhambry’s picture

saurabh.bhambry commented

Hey .. Thanks .. I have been experimenting with it of late.

Bhambry

stodge’s picture

stodge commented

Why no "Technology" section? Good site though, very impressive.

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

On the to do list. Now it's all part of the Business section.

DigitalDaz’s picture

DigitalDaz commented

I've been thinking is there any other software that gives you this sort of flexibility and I just can't find any.

On the downside, am I missing all the documentation or is it sparse? I'm quite happy to go digging into files, its just difficult finding which ones. the views.inc mentioned earlier doesn't exist on mine, I'll persevere though.

Summit’s picture

Summit commented

Hi,
will the original stated custom module to get three columns easily and this nice theme be avialable to drupal.org?
Great site!

Greetings,
Martijn
www.trekking-world.com

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

It'll require some work before it's ready for public consumption. Right now, it's too customized for the site. When I find some free time, I'll work on it.

Summit’s picture

Summit commented

Hi Sinmao,

Thanks in advance for trying. Hopefully you find the time!

Greetings,
Martijn
if you appreciate e-development work, please place a link from your site to www.trekking-world.com

arena’s picture

arena commented

wow! excellent work, congratulations!!

preetinder’s picture

preetinder commented

very nice work.
the design/layout is impressive.

kobnim’s picture

kobnim commented

great site!

samperez’s picture

samperez commented

Hey, this design really worth more than just to be used for a hobbie.

I believe you have the ability to turns this into a money making site.

Good luck!

leostar’s picture

leostar commented

Hey...

Is it possible to post the step by step instructions about Views and CCK....? It will be really helpful for Drupal community..

Thanks,
Leo

arjunkr’s picture

arjunkr commented

hai very impressive site , it helps a lot of newbies like me , what can be done with drupal...:)
please post step by step instructions to do similar site...which may be very good learning curve for members like me ..

ambiance7’s picture

ambiance7 commented

Kudos to you for an excellent job!

tamasolasz’s picture

tamasolasz commented

very nice work indeed.
I would like my front page to look like http://www.wopular.com/news-source/220673
but I'd like to show only the titles. how would I be able to achieve that?

himtuna’s picture

himtuna commented

you may use panels for that.
Create three column layout and add views generated pages on them

domineaux’s picture

domineaux commented

Site is very nicely done... what is the point?
You link out to all the sites that are making the ad revenue and you are making none.
Service to the community?
Honestly, I don't see the point of the site.
Web Users can get news everywhere, so you spoon feed them and pay for all the bandwidth and maintain the site.
The linked sites all have comments, and are getting most of them for sure.
It doesn't appear you are pushing any special interest or making some kind of statement, political, social or otherwise.
If your interest was to present what can be done with Drupal... I guess that's good enough reason.

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Right now, it's mostly just for me to learn lamp. Keeps my skills up to date.

syh’s picture

syh commented

nice site, conratulations!

rockitdev’s picture

rockitdev commented

First, this is a great site.

What i wanted to know is, how do you generate your taxonomy/terms that are on each node? is this a manual process or are you using an automated one?

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

Hi rockitdev,

Thanks. It's a manual process. The Aggregation module actually allows you to get taxonomy/terms from the feeds, but they grow so fast that it slows down my system, and a lot of them are not well categorized. I just did my own cuz it's more manageable (but time consuming). I may revisit the auto-generated taxonomy in the future though.

Brentnauer’s picture

Brentnauer commented

I'm interested in how you achieved the new search functionality. Care to share? It's extremely well done!

sinmao’s picture

sinmao commented

I will. Still working on some finishing touches. Once that's done, I'll do a write-up for you guys.

Johnbmtl’s picture

Johnbmtl commented

Hi

Love your site and I appreciate the write up.

After a bout 5 hours, i just can't get the feeds to appear in the panels.

I get the feed title, but I just can't seem to be able to get the text that follows.

Any help would be appreciated!

John

chien_fu’s picture

chien_fu commented

I've been looking to do a similar thing. I'm starting out with trying to use your implementation and grab wikipedia biographical info on random people. Can you describe a little more about how you incorporated with wikipedia?
As far as I can see there is no feed available for general biographies or articles on wikipedia, so how are you grabbing that data?
Thanks a bazillion.