By noslokire on

Robinson Papers, a community newspaper company in the Seattle, Washington area, re-launched their two of their four websites in February 2009 on Drupal 5. The site has a complex design that was outsourced to Hovie Design Studios based in the Ballard Neighborhood of Seattle, and the Drupal development team behind the site, Freelock Computing, would like to share a few of their techniques with the community.

West Seattle Herald - http://www.westseattleherald.com

Ballard News Tribune - http://www.ballardnewstribune.com

For reference to the old site, see their Federal Way News website at http://www.federalwaynews.net which will remain on the old system until later this summer.

Drupal vs. Joomla

The old websites ran on a proprietary CMS system that allowed for a single weekly upload. It required articles to be broken down into multiple .txt files and images to produce a single page of html on the site. Once uploaded, the page was static in nature and the system lacked a level of interaction with the reader that today's online newspapers require. Editors were required to upload the same article multiple times per edition, per paper, which meant the same work was being repeated continuously.

The internal staff was originally proposed Joomla by a separate development company, but as soon as the level of complexity eclipsed Joomla's capability (week 2), the developer contacted Freelock Computing about using Drupal, primarily because of its ability to handle a complex taxonomy system and ability to share stories and users across multiple sites.

Frontpage and Section Layouts

The theme was done twice during development, once as a sample and once to implement Hovie Design Studio's beautiful design into the Blueprint starter theme. Our lead programmer for this project, ksenzee, was able to weave the same theme into four different sites, each with a different banner, different Google Ad Manager generated slots, different articles and views, all while switching layouts for homepage layouts, section layouts, and article layouts.

Katherine has since moved on to Acquia, bless her heart, and I am hoping that she will comment below and leave a few more tricks and tips because there was some definite magic going on in her theme, and my words just don't capture it all.

Data Import

The data import is literally scraping their old site and mapping both images, taxonomy terms, authors, images, domains and old urls into the Drupal system. This was a long and complicated process due to the limitations of the old proprietary system, which created a new URL each week of publication for the same article, and created new articles in each of the four papers. We automated much of the user mapping, taxonomy, and images, but we were forced to use human eyes to do the finishing work. The migrate project was not yet released, so we used the node import module with several patches from the queue.

In the end, we scraped over 15,000 articles across the 4 papers dating back 3 years.

Workflow and Article Management

With nine different roles doing nine different tasks internally from four different office locations, it was essential to have a workflow system to notify, process and automatically update nodes as they made their way through the publishing cycle. The operational consulting around streamlining and automating this portion of the website and its interaction with the actual print version of the paper was complex. It involved actions, triggers and multiple states, each with multiple levels of accessibility and permissions. With each role able to see and alter different levels of information, we used CCK Field Permissions to hide fields, Taxonomy Role to hide taxonomies, and a long list of user permissions and testing because of the nine different user roles.

Building in Third-Party Systems

This site is running a few third-party systems. We used the Delve Networks API to create a custom module to display streaming videos hosting on their service and relate them to the different news stories. Google Ad Manager is being used on the site, but we had to custom code the Google Ad Manager code directly into the template in order to handle the 250+ ad slots available for sale by Robinson Papers.

Module Contributors to Thank

Big thank you to the module maintainers and users of these projects that helped firm up and support the D5 versions well after they should have.

  • CCK
  • Views
  • Domain
  • Workflow - As mentioned above, we used this module extensively to help with automating processes

Miscellaneous Modules

  • Devel - A life saver at times, helped tremendously in identifying problems
  • Location - Used to link together the community resources

The New York Observer writeup and the techniques it outlines were also very helpful.

The Obvious: Drupal 5 vs. 6

The decision was made over a year ago to go with Drupal 5 because of the lagging of CCK and Views, which makes the cornerstones of great sites, this one included. Because of the custom modules we have running on the site and the level of integration with third-party systems, the decision was made to keep the site on D5 even as D6 matured. That being said, around launch we were backporting some modules to get them to what we wanted. If we were to start again today, there would be no reason not to do D6.

Challenges

Multiple developers, multiple project managers, and lots of customer input equals a long development cycle and lots of detail. We luckily have a great team that was able to finish the job.

  • Design: As the design was handled externally, we had a long wait from the time the project was started to the time the design came in. After we received the design, we had to alter some of our original plans to accommodate the new design elements.
  • Third-party integration was a killer, with lots of gotchas and items that went outside of the original scope.
  • Scraping - four sites, third party proprietary code, different databases, no dumps available, and we had to suck them into one. Enough said.

Learn about Newspaper sites built on Drupal

Learn more! The Newspapers Group is a great resource for newspapers looking to bolster their online presence using the Drupal CMS.

Contacts

Please feel free to leave your comments, thanks to all!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

ksenzee’s picture

ksenzee
she/her
Location Seattle area
commented

I'm afraid my "tips and tricks" for D5 theme switching come down to hacking patching hacking core. If you've set an admin theme on a D5 site, you've probably seen it switch back to your default theme when you submit a form. That's a bug. On most sites it's just annoying -- only the admins notice it, and they can deal -- but we had the same thing happening to end users when we set a custom theme in hook_init. In the end we had to patch init_theme, and add a function call to our custom module as well. So it's a patch plus a hack. Luckily we used git for core version control, which makes it a breeze to update even if you're killing kittens maintaining core patches.

AaronELBorg’s picture

AaronELBorg commented

In the spirit of saving keystrokes, I was just wondering if we could call a "patch plus a hack" a "plack"?

[I'm here all week, folks.]

skullcap’s picture

skullcap commented

Nice site much nicer then the old one.

Thanks for the write up, I love reading about these big sites that get set up in Drupal.

rroche’s picture

rroche commented

I know this is an old post, I'm curious to know if the Delve Networks moduel was made available somewhere, or if it was a private piece of code