Magazine module in the works
After some playing around with static pages, books, and a variety of other organization techniques for my magazine content, I've decided that there are just some key features I want to implement that I don't see in existing modules. Thus, I'm undertaking the creation of a "magazine" module. Here are core features that I'm building in ...
1) Hierarchy Taxonomy Organization. The magazine will have a two-tier taxonomy at minimum - the top tier will represent issues and the second tier will represent sections within each issue. Subsections will be optional, requiring a three tier hierarchy if implemented
2) Permissions - I've got four access rights defined. "Access Current Issue" will allow access to the current issue of the magazine. "Access Magazine Archive" will allow access the magazine archive. "Maintain Magazine" will allow administrators to create new magazine pages.
3) Menu links - An archive link is added to the menu with will provide access to a summary page listing each magazine in the archive. Links are provided to maintain and ad new magazines under the administrator link.
4) Creating a new issue - Each issue will be identified by a taxonomy term at the top level of the magazine taxonomy. The lowest level of the magazine taxonomy will be a container for teasers to stories published in the magazine. Each teaser will support the inclusion of a thumbnail image, title, author, summary and link to a story. Administrative options for new issues include setting a publication data, option to promote the issue Table of Contents to the front page on the publication date.
5) Cron - Issue will be published on a schedule specified in the issue configuration. Publication of a new issue will automatically move the prior issue to the archive. New issue will automatically be promoted to the front page if administrator requires it.
6) Provided that it's not too challenging I'll implement a hook into the RRS system so that RRS feeds are automatically updated on the publication of a new issue.
If anyone out there has additional recommendations or requests I'll consider them as I work on the module. Once I have a stable release I'll submit it.
- Mac
I have wanted ..
to be able to do something like this for a long time.
I run www.oasismag.com , and it would be cool to be able to set up a monthly 'best of' magazine .. sorted by poems / essays / whatever.
best of section...
How about having a best of section that is global - automatically added to the bottom of every issue, and a sample article from each section that has achieved some popularity threshold defined in the magazine settings?
I could also see having a best of page that displays the most popular articles of all time from each section.
I'm not sure if either of these items will make it into my first pass, but I like them both and would be interested in incorporating them once I have the basic features implemented.
BTW - I'm planning to have a functional module ready for production use before the end of the month. I don't have a lot of time to devote to this but so far things are going really well - I'm very impressed with the Drupal architecture.
Sounds great.
Sounds great, i will be looking forward to seeing your mod in action. I like the idea of having the ablity to create more of a structured presentation of content and can see many uses for this type of presenation in my work.
This sounds great! I will cer
This sounds great! I will certainly be looking forward to it. Thanks for your work.
Campsite
Maybe you find inspiration (and reusable code) in the opensource tool Campsite, devoted to publish magazines online. It has features like the ones you describe and it's a quite efficient piece of software. More at http://www.campware.org/.
I'm enthusiastic - here are some suggestions
I've been looking at this kind of functionality for some time, restricting myself to PHP/MySQL based freeware. I run a small website which publishes multiple magazines in different languages, and I haven't really found anything that covers all my requirements: however I have come up with a fairly consistent set of things that are lacking in the CMS products I have looked at and which I would like to see, so here goes:
1) I want to publish several magazines, such that the front page of the site consists of titles and teasers for each article in the current issue of each magazine. In terms of the suggestion here I guess you could say that there is a three-level hierarchy: magazine, issue, article.
2) I agree with the idea of the two-tier taxonomy within the magazine as basic, however my magazines cover a considerable variety of subjects which can be looked at in different ways, so I want to be able to apply as many taxonomies as necessary down to the level of the article. The editors/authors should be able to choose how to classify the article.
3) The editing interface must be INCREDIBLY EASY to user :-) because my authors have ZERO computing skills. In fact, I'm trying to get them to use OpenOffice to generate the HTML which they then just cut and paste into the editing window, for example. If possible avoid having to put in all sorts of special formatting (like Wikis): just basic HTML (like this input window).
4) Article size runs to 60K bytes - must be no problem handling this.
5) Our articles are often about historical subjects, and I want to make sure that they are available indefinitely - so a good archive browsing taxonomy would be essential (maybe that's by default in Drupal).
6) Be able to request one issue of a magazine, or just one article, for display/download in PDF (and support UNICODE in PDF so that there is no conflict between Drupal's UTF-8 content and the PDF, and it will handle my various languages: English of course but also French, German, Russian, Hindi... Means that phppdflib is no good)
7) Have a "Dump" feature which will dump out the whole archive of magazines, or just a single magazine, into a series of HTML files which could be easily transferred to another site, in the case that Drupal goes belly-up for some reason.
8) Ah yes, languages.... There really ought to be some means on the site for just switching to another language and getting a display of articles in that language. This means that every magazine, issue, article, needs ideally to have a language parameter - no idea how all that could be handled in Drupal though.
Hope these are of some help... and I will be glad to see the system working and try it out.
Joel G
Hi, I've been following this
Hi, I've been following this thread closely as we have a magazine on the web as well, and have much wanted magazine-specific options built within Drupal as we don't have the time to deeply customize.
It's been a while since this was posted -- any progress? Need any help?
Check out View Online!
This post is not about thread but
This post is not about thread but about http://view.rit.edu :)
I need my front page nodes to look like on http://view.rit.edu (to have image, image description, file attached e.t.c) In addition i need custom layout for my front page (there is my quastion).
Please say what modules and themes you use for http://view.rit.edu
Thanks, Alexandr
Is this in the works?
I was recently contacted by someone that wants to do almost exactly this. Is this just planning or is there something almost ready?
I don't want to hassle anyone just curious.
Thanks
took a lickin' ...
Sorry, all. I've been out of commission for a while as the magazine business that I was preparing the module for went belly up. I haven't logged in for a while and the level of interest is rekindling me spirit a little.
I'll do a review of my project status when I left off, and see where things need to go from here.
- Mac
Thanks
I know how things like that go.
Just checking myself. :-)
Packing it in...
Given that my regular job is consuming a lot of time I don't have any extra energy to devote to this task right now. I didn't really make much progress with it in the first place, but there is a little work done. If someone else wants to take the ball and run with it I'll be happy to hand off my work.
- Mac
any progress
I am interested in implementing this in the next month or so. ?
Sanity is a sandbox in the playground of my mind.I'm going to go play on the swings now.
he does state that he has giv
he does state that he has given it up, i really do hope that someone with the know-how could pick this up. it would be a really great addtion to drupal.
:water
already done a lot
of that with ZOPE
but I would be happy to take a look-see at the Drupal module... where can I find it?
magazine module
Ok,
Sorry about the long delay. I tried to create a new contributed module today but didn't work so well and I'm not sure why. So, I've forwarded the module to Dries and I hope that he can get it posted for the rest of you to work with. It is currently not complete, but it includes pages to administer the module, create a magazine taxonomy and create magazine pages. The "table of contents" navigation is not implemented.
Also, please review the http://drupal.org/node/view/5933 which contains a patch that I found necessary to properly navigate the taxonomy tree for the magazine administration page.
I will try to follow this thread and be available if people have questions about where I left off in the module development, and what remains to be done.
Regards,
Mac
Is it still in the offing?
It has been quite some time now. Do we have anything in the offing, Mac?
Subir
Me too
I'll just echo that I'd love to see this idea come to fruition, should anyone still be working on it.
Periodical
Haven't tried the Periodical module yet, but it sounds like what's being discussed....
http://drupal.org/node/14252
[a.k.a. MegaGrunt]
I'm the ghost of modules past
BAM! a year to the day from the first post! And here i am, wondering, "Hey, wasn't there supposed to be a magazine module?"
.... But now I've got a magazine that needs a site/cms... there's some promising leads - workflow, front page, etc. But still it would be nice to tie these things together... So that a site could go from writing articles, then send it to the press, then automagically publish the articles to an unsuspecting world. Then if things could be contained so that all of the articles were on the site but seperatable by issue, well that would be awesome.
Totally freaky that this forum page is a year old and I wandered into it today... Happy Birthday Magazine module page!
[]+][+][+[]
erik mallinson
http://coacalina.org
Exactly what I am looking
Exactly what I am looking for since yesterday....
Should I try the Periodical module?
What I would like to see is a mechanism to generate a PDF file from articles belonging to one issue, according to a specified template.
Any chance?
is the magazine module ready?
i'm new to drupal, but having searched the site i couldn't find any magazine.module. please let me know if it exists?
I think it's vaporware and
I think it's vaporware and yet all around us. The 'magazine' module wasn't ever finished I guess, but a combo of other modules probably does the same if not more. Try actions, workflow, taxonomy by role, and e-commerce to get some functionality of what a good magazine module might have. I would also recommend assessing what you'd like to do first and then browse the modules. I find that when trying to browse modules first for this sort of thing it's easy to get lost.
It's Jan 29 2006, almost 2
It's Jan 29 2006, almost 2 years since the mention of this magazine module and I'm just wondering if there is such a drupal module out? If not, are there any modules someone could suggest me that does the work in a combination of being used together that the magazine module would have done itself?
Also does anyone know what kind of modules in drupal i would need if i were building a drupal magazine site like the snowboard magazine (www.snowboard-mag.com)?
Thanks & Happy New Year to this magazine module page:)
I second that Stravinskyi
Come on guys this is a wonderful cms.
PLEASE,PLEASE,PLEASE,PLEASE, could someone look into creating a magazine module. I personally think it would increase DRUPAL's Kudos in the net community tenfold and save little ole me one hell of a head ache.
Many thanks
Magazine module = vague
I think what a magazine 'module' would entail would really be a collection of modules, or a preconfigured installation of Drupal. I don't think there will be a single module that will spit out magazines.
Magazine Module is complete or not
I want this type of module for my site does it completed or not .. i have searched but i dont find it when i can expect to get it..
done it?
have you achieved this?
http://www.icthelpline.org
future reference
I know it's an old thread, but for future reference I'll answer anyway. I can't see why anybody would have need for such a module, here and now in 2008.
1) The two-tier taxonomy suggested is just silly. You'd want a vocab for editions and one for sections, so that you can access the content of a section regardless of what edition it is in.
2) Permissions: there are modules out there that allow access to certain content for a certain time. Premium content is one of those.
3) A link to each edition (a sort of archive) kan be easily accomplished with Views
4) Creating a new issue is creating a new vocab term. Additionally, you might want to create a CCK type "edition" that stores the publication date, cover and PDF or something like that.
5) I guess the cron stuff wouldn't be too hard, but it's easier to just do this by using the content overview page, and that way the final publication remains a decision made by a human.
6) RSS feeds are updated automatically anyway.
7) Internationalization and localization features (i18n) are top-notch in Drupal 6
8) PDF exports are easy too with a module
That said, there has been talk about making Drupal more newspaper-friendly. One direction is by enabling easy web-to-print publication workflows. Another is by making a standard install profile and newspaper theme. Progress on both has been slow, but there's a lot of interesting stuff happening this summer (Google Summer of Code projects and stuff). One pitfall is that newsmedia sites are usually quite complex and there is no single drupal install to fit them all - so you should never expect Drupal to do what you want it to do out-of-the-box. The install profile, if it ever gets done, will probably be aimed at non-technical users or people exploring the possibilities of Drupal, not at big media.
Some interesting discussions over here: http://groups.drupal.org/newspapers-on-drupal