The Progressive runs Drupal
robertDouglass - November 12, 2005 - 19:54
I used to subscribe to The Progressive and now I'm glad to see that they put my subscription dollars to good use and bought themselves the best CMS on the market; Drupal. Perhaps someone at The Progressive might want to share your story about how you chose Drupal and what it is like running a major news site with it?
Update Nov. 13: The Progressive is a well established voice in the fight for protecting free speech and the environment in the United States. They serve their readership with articles and interviews that tend to be intellectual and free-thinking with a bent towards activism.
Why we chose Drupal
I'm the webmaster at The Progressive. We chose Drupal for two reasons:
Simplicity. We looked at several CMSs and Drupal just felt right to us. Since we had a static site we wanted something that wasn't unnecessarily complicated. We knew we'd have our hands full just converting years of pages into data that could be served. We didn't want to spend a year developing or learning a new system.
Drupal can do anything we can imagine. We love experimenting with new modules and are addicted to tweaking existing modules to make our site do exactly what we want.
Community. Drupal users and developers are geniuses! When we run into a snag or want to do something new... a search at Drupal.org is guaranteed to get the ball rolling. Chances are someone else has already tried it and posted advice.
Whether you inhabit the right, left, or center of the web Drupal is the perfect tool to manage your content.
Dennis
The site hides the fact that it is Drupal very well
Congratulations on a very nice site.
I have a 'why don't you?' question.
You use clean url practically everywhere - I have seen, that you do not use it (yet) for taxonomy terms. When you go into the Sitemap you see a ?q=taxonomy/term/42.
Why don't you create a url alias for taxonomy/term/42 so you would also have clean urls in your site map?
Congratulations again.
Paddy.
Just a matter of time
Good point. We have a ton of work ahead of us and this is definitely on the to-do list.
Thanks for the fast response!
Your magazine, and your website, rock! I'll spend lots of time reading articles there, congratulations =)
- Robert Douglass
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My sites: HornRoller.com, RobsHouse.net
Fantastic example for flexibility of theme engines
My main concern with using Drupal for our intranet is that it might not be able to handle complex layouts. This site has blown my anxieties away. :)
This is a beautiful use of
This is a beautiful use of Drupal and the least Drupal-looking site I have seen-- which is a good thing. It means you really shaped the visual design thoughtfully. I'm very interested in how you set up the layout of your theme and modules, and how much php tweaking vs css tweaking you had to do.
Your visual design is fabulous. Great use of color, blocks etc. My biggest complaint about the Drupal community is that it is so content and programmer oriented, that the design/visual help discussion doesn't get down to the "how to" level-- especially for us newbies.
What I'd like is a blow-by-blow of what starting theme you used (if any), modules (looks like you based it on flexiblock), what css files you modified and how, etc. Any level of description you are willing to share would be fantastic.
www.cpnhelp.org
I second that! How did you
I second that! How did you manage to make it look so different from a standard drupal site - especially the homepage? It really works.
___
www.liberalthinkers.org - a community for liberal viewpoints.
CSS
I don't remember which phptemplate theme we started with... but here are some basic things we did...
• We have a couple of core themes and use the sections module
• The front page has it's own set of themes but we use static elements (placed directly on the page.tpl.php) and snippets... There are no blocks (sidebars) per se on the front page
• We use the the sections module to switch the configuration of the front page from time to time
• We use phpadsnew to serve ads
• We use block elements to display contextual elements (editor's bio, etc.) depending on the name of the page (url alias)
• We don't use flexinode or flexiblock, etc. It's a basic install. We just hack existing modules a little...
• We also cheat... we use tables on the page.tpl.php pages on the templates to get things right... Don't let our name fool you, we are too old school to use pure 100% CSS at this point... :-)
And finally... CSS CSS CSS
Oh and hours of trial and error, hair pulling, and searching this wonderful site... drupal.org.
4.7 codebase?
Does this mean you're using the 4.7 codebase?
- Robert Douglass
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My sites: HornRoller.com, RobsHouse.net
why not banner?
Any specific reasons why not the Drupal banner module?
--
Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com
Ad management system
phpadsnew is a high volume advertising management system, including full management of clients, campaigns, etc. etc. -- you can actually use it centrally and deploy across many sites, or integrate it locally via PHP includes.
banner.module is a simple way of inserting banner-type content on a Drupal site.
Just bumping due to phpadsnew..
and would love to know more of how The Progressive did it. I am planning to use PHPADSNEW extensively throughout my site but cannot find a lot of info in the Drupal forums on the subject. The Progressive however seems to use a fair number of ads on the site...
Any and all info would be really appreciated...
Cheers
Thank you for The Progressive
I've been susbscribing to The Progressive for years and was very pleased to see that Drupal was the magazine's CMS.
I was wondering if you can release the entire theme, etc to the community so others can benefit from it?
Best regards,
phpadsnew
Hello Dennis...hopefull you will be able to read this. I would like to know if you will be willing to share ways that you have been using phpadsnew. Or any one else for that matter.
Any info would be great
Coll
Hmm, I hadn't heard about
Hmm, I hadn't heard about this magazine. Thanks for the heads up I'm going to have to make it one of my weekly stops :)
============================================
BuyBlue.org
Clean URLs?
I have a question about your URLs. Your posts seem to have custom URLs like this:
http://progressive.org/mag_wx1111
While they are 'clean', they are not very search engine friendly because the URL still does not say anything about the content. Is there a reason for this?
It would be much better would be to have the title in the URL (you can use pathauto.module for this). And you would notice a much better search engine ranking as well.
--
If you have a problem, please search before posting a question.
Clean URLs...
One reason we have the funky names is that we use the (excellent) Sections module extensively. Pages that have names that begin with "mag_" get the green theme, pages that also contain "wx" also get unique block with our editor's info, pages with "conniff" get our political editor Ruth Conniff's bio, and so on....
Plus it's a holdover from the static days so we were able to import thousands of page titles e.g. "wx_123.html" into the paths data table.
We sacrifice google candy for sanity and theme-ability.
Best of both worlds
You could do something like:
/mag/wx/article-title-goes-here
--
If you have a problem, please search before posting a question.
...They serve their
--by Bèr Kessels http://drupal.org/node/37408
Re "update Nov 13"--Why the special need to promote the Progressive's content? It comes across as promoting your political preference and takes away from your interesting article on how they implemented Drupal.
I agree with Bèr Kessels-- I'd rather just read about drupal on the drupal site, thanks...
Don't worry, be happy
In the linked item, Bèr objected to the phrase "Communist China".
That's hardly the same as someone showing enthusiasm for their website's mission. What is offensive about that? People don't build websites to show off technology. They build them for a reason.
When I announce my new Drupal church websites, I may say some little churchy thing about them. I hope you will be able to tolerate my enthusiasm even if you're not a churchgoer yourself. :-)
true...
true, i hope we are all tolerant of each other. maybe I'm just pregnant and cranky. I just felt like this post was different from yours, as your enthusiasm for church was probably expressed in a forum post, rather than right on the drupal homepage. I have worked in the communications field for years, and so I saw this in terms of readership and audiences: In putting it on the homepage, it makes the progressive's political stance seem like an official tie-in with drupal and so marginalizes visitors the website as a whole. Of the thousands of visitors to this site, surely someone has a different point of view and yet drupal has just said that in doing so they're not "free-thinking" or "intellectual".
That's all. I apologize if I'm blowing the impact of this part of the drupal homepage out of proportion. In my field, putting a statement like that on the homepage of a non-political site is seen as unprofessional and runs the risk of turning people away.
I won't say anything more about it...as I like drupal and am very grateful for the work everyone of every political persuasion has put into it. In fact, I just don't want to see all that great work undermined, but apparently this was a weird way to go about it:)
You are right ;)
But of course the normative and evaluative element is already present in the title.
'The progressive' - heh, well to progress demands a pre-set goal - otherwise it would just be movement.
I am sure we cannot all agree on one goal worth striving for so the title in itself tries to monopolize the moral high ground.
Best regards,
Lennart - forsker.net
Off topic, sorry, but I couldn't resist...
Like "People" magazine... What "people" are they highlighting? :)
- Aaron
Culture Fix Web Identity & Design
Digital Folk Art (my blog)
No problem :)
My comment was sort of ment as a joke - but I know, the Danish irony does not come across easily :)
People Magazine ? Hmmm -- stupid, famous people ?!
Best regards,
Lennart - forsker.net
FYI
This actually is a forum post... :)
Michelle
The Statement is OK
I really don't see how one could interpret that statement as implying that people with a different point of view are not "free-thinking" or "intellectual." It simply says that the magazine offers free-thinking, intellectual articles. One could say the same about some right-leaning periodical as well, and that doesn't mean they suddenly cancel each other out. There is a huge difference between implication and inference.
I personally believe the statement is fine where it is, because it helps to define the magazine for people who may have not heard of it. It's definitely a site worth showcasing, both because of its noteriety and because of the quality of the site. And people who might be offended by the content will be sufficiently warned so they don't accidently click on it. :)
- Aaron
Culture Fix Web Identity & Design
Digital Folk Art (my blog)
The site in question is a
The site in question is a very nice example of a custom presentation of Drupal. It is themed and has multiple appearances depending on links. It was a successful migration from a legacy method and they are enjoying using Drupal for thei product.
Fancy Drupal based sites have often been promoted to drupal.org's front page.
http://drupal.org/node/34926
http://drupal.org/node/31695
http://drupal.org/node/30118
http://drupal.org/node/30026
This is a standard practice.
-sp
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
Loose association between progressive (left) causes and Drupal
Well, there is a loose association between Drupal and left causes. It's certainly not a formal relationship. Generally speaking, the left has capitalized on Drupal much more than the right. Much of the credit for that probably go to CivicSpace and their roots in the Dean campaign. I would also argue that it's a cultural thing. Progressives tend to want to seek community and consensus and would quickly embrace software like Drupal. It's a natural fit for them.
By the way, since I'm not in the PR field, I can openly say that I hope the right never discovers Drupal so we folks on the left can use it to out flank the well-financed, right-wing agenda.
--
Get better help from Drupal's forums and read this.
Maybe not in the USA yet...
... but in Hungary, www.demokrata.hu for example is the biggest right-wing weekly and look what it runs...
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Read my developer blog on Drupal4hu.
Interesting
Is that site an exception or are there many other right-wing causes in Hungary that have embraced Drupal?
I should have pointed out that I can speak for what's going on in America. Though I'm sure some right-wingers in America use Drupal, they are few and far between.
--
Get better help from Drupal's forums and read this.
hmmm
i didn't know your cms platform indicated your political leanings...
;0)
(So I guess right-wingers generally use blogger, lefties use drupal and terrorists use ___________ (fill in your least favorite cms.)
silverwing - ;0)
(remember, this post if for fun....)
No, the content determines your leanings
Note that I say "generally speaking" a couple of posts up.
--
Get better help from Drupal's forums and read this.
Here is an example
Here is a right wing site that uses Drupal
http://www.settingtheworldtorights.com/node/16
Although they claim to be leaning toward Libertarianism, their stances are often indistinguishable from right wingers.
--
Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com
Libertarians
I know a lot of libertarians use Drupal -you decide if that is left or right ;)
http://www.settingtheworldtorights.com/
http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/
Best regards,
Lennart - forsker.net
Political preference revealed? No way.
Sorry, but the text you quote doesn't have any sort of political preference in it. Unless, of course, you're trying to accuse me of having a preference for politicians who are intellectual and free-thinking... then I'm guilty as accused. Activism isn't a political preference either. It's a way of expressing your political preference, and no political party or faction has a monopoly on it.
Furthermore, the way the Drupal community works, people like me can post things in the forums (which is where this post started), and site administrators who find it interesting can promote it. It wasn't written to be on the front page, it ended up there because of its perceived value.
But if you want to know the truth... I, Robert Douglass, who doesn't speak for Drupal.org, think The Progressive rocks. Go read it!
- Robert Douglass
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My sites: HornRoller.com, RobsHouse.net
great site
I just came across The Progressive last week after discovering that my site (Poolitics) was mentioned on their blog and I never would've guessed that it was powered by Drupal.
Very well done.