By nthyssen on

Hi!

For years we have done like most newspapers do: Developed our own strange system in PHP with all its quirks, limitations and redundant development.

We need a new CMS to help us reinvent our newspaper on the internet - and was hoping to use an open source CMS as foundation. But we are a small organization and and need some help choosing the right one.

So please: Help us choose which CMS would make a great start for developing a newspaper CMS. If you have any experience or have tried anything similiar, please let us know what you did: System, modules, plugins? How difficult was it, is architecture right for a news site etc. etc.

We have been looking at Drupal, but we're not sure if it's the one.

This is a "wish list" for all the stuff we would like to have. Any good ideas?

Thanks,
Nikolai

CORE FUNCTIONALITY:

• Articles - the newspaper is released everyday at midnight
• Photos, video, multimedia galleries
• Sections - like any newspaper: domestic, international, arts, opinion etc.
• Archive - 40 years of newspaper articles and a vital and central search
• Special reports - provisional and topical sections
• Reuse of content in different sections and on different sites
• User registration - system has to handle paying subscribers as well as freebies
• "My newspaper" - every reader should his own place on the net with all of his comments, saved articles, newsletters, feeds, and subscription info
• Community - rating system for articles, comments and users (reputation) - high rated content should rise to the top and in the comments it should be possible to differentiate between non registered, registered, verified and subscriber. Maybe even a "3 out of 5 found this comment interesting". Etc.
• RSS feeds for everything (news, sections, writers, comments etc.)
• Email and text message alerts, "email this", "receive alert on your cell when"
• Easy to read and search friendly permalinks
• Staff directory
• Flexible walling: we would like to have option to sell one article, micropayment: a daypass, access to the archieves for a week, a topical newsletter etc.
• E-commerce: buy the book, the movie, subscribe to the newspaper etc.

EXTRAS

• Polls
• Questionnaires
• Calendar (for events)
• Ad, banner and intersticials management
• Classifieds
• Reader blogs

CMS

• Role based CMS - super simple backend interface: editors should be able to create provisional sections on the fly, writers add stores ads easy like sending a Gmail
• Visual shuffling of content on pages (mayby some AJAXY interface - like netvibes.com). As we are a small organisation, we need the editorial (non-web) staff to take part in updating
• Image and document upload - maybe even some advanced image handling

TECHNICAL

• XML import - from our publishing system (SaxoPress)
• Open source, large community
• Upgradable
• PHP and MySQL
• Perfomance: Fast and database efficient

Comments

cel4145’s picture

cel4145 commented

This has to be quick, so

1) Take a look at The Onion. They use Drupal. That'll give you some idea of what Drupal can do.

2) I imagine you are going to have to do some custom coding if you use Drupal. But the advantage is that you could contribute back to the community. No more going at alone with a customized php system, but rather being a part of something much bigger where you need to do much less to end up with a much better software product than you have now. So factor in the benefit of going open source as a contributor in your decision.

theichurch’s picture

theichurch commented

There are several worthy CMS systems out there that you could use including Drupal, Joomla!, and several others. Drupal should work quite well for you.

Much of this is straight forward and there are either core components or modules to handle what you are looking for. Some of these modules include page, story, poll, taxonomy (you can create categories and have content reused over different categories..very powerful), RSS (RSS is everywhere in Drupal), e-commerce, blogs, modules for google adense or if you want to manage your own ads, events and many other ways to extend that, calendar (for archives), rating, and many more.

There are even things you did not mention here such as modules to email a page or make the page printer friendly.

There may be some module customization required to work with SaxoPress but Drupal makes module writing pretty easy.

Drupal also has a role system that is very customizable and flexible. You create roles, assign privelegs to roles, and then assign roles to users.

Drupal 4.7 also has some native AJAX and there are AJAX modules being written.

You may want to make some test install and start playing around and reading the handbook to figure out how to do things. There are newspaper sites already running Drupal. One of the most well know is The Onion. There are, also, a number of local papers using Drupal.

johsw’s picture

johsw commented

Hi y'all

I'm a webdeveloper at information.dk - It's really nice to hear that you think drupal could be a solution. And it's super to see how competent and fastresponding a community drupal has. Wow.

I would like to know if any of you have experience with drupal and larger databases. Our article base is about 1.5 mb and has more than 110.000 rows. Still we would like to have a fast and userfriendly archive. Is drupal fast enough this?

And maybe you could let us in on how drupal compares to for instance joomla, postnuke or textpattern. What are the up- and downsides?

Best,
Johs. Wehner

theichurch’s picture

theichurch commented

Drupal should be able to handle large databases because it is the database who has to be able to handle the load in this case. Drupal will make requests to the database and the database will spit back a response.

mysql is what many people use for drupal. This database is the same one the wikipedia.org uses and can handle hundreds of thousands of rows. In the end, if the database can handle the load then drupal should be able to manage, too.

Compared to the rest...

Postnuke - I havn't used that in awhile. At least a good year... maybe a year and a half... I found with Drupal and Joomla/Mambo that I could get a much more customized and controlled look.

Joomla - Joomla is at this point very similar to Mambo since they just split. Both are pretty good, lots of modules, and are customizable. Personally, I have found drupal easier to customize in the look. Also, I have found drupal modules and API to the core functionality to be the easier way to write custom code to modify things. Joomla/Mambos mambots and other options were not nearly as easy. Joomla wants to make it easier in the future but it isn't right now. Then, there are search engine friendly URL such as http://www.mysite.com/articles/2006/05/05/mystory. Drupal has this built into the core and in 4.7 there is a big performance boost. For Joomla/Mambo you have to buy a module with that functionality. Oh yeah, and drupal also have a very flexible roles system. Joomla only has a few stock ones. This is, also, on the list to expand but isn't yet in Joomla.

Now, Drupal isn't perfect. The learning curve is higher. There isn't enough documentatin on the theming such as all the CSS that is auto generated (although there are efforts starting up to get going on this). And, many people like the the admin menu for Joomla (Drupal has a module that does bring much of this in).

I would take them for a spin and really see what they can do for you.

cel4145’s picture

cel4145 commented

As you know, speed is relative to many factors other than the application itself (hardware, database/webserver application configuration, # of users, other services running, etc.). However, you might notice that drupal.org has over 61,000 nodes (pages) now.

riondluz’s picture

riondluz commented

While i like Drupal (spec. its taxonomy approach for categorization) I decided it was overkill for an online, interactive newspaper. As such, i modded the latest postnuke and came up with what i
use as an 'aggregate' for many publishers; but it would work as easily for just one publisher as many. Check out newsweeklies.org/demo and vt.newsweeklies.net for examples.

Joe Connolly’s picture

Joe Connolly commented

Much of what you want done is already done by local and regional newspapers. Check out this one, "TIRASPOL TIMES AND WEEKLY REVIEW", which uses Drupal: www.tiraspoltimes.com.
It is a newspaper from Pridnestrovie (Transnistria), which is a new country in Eastern Europe; next to Ukraine.

davej’s picture

davej commented

I see that no-one has commented on the requirements for pay to view / micropayment / sell one article. I need this for an upcoming site, how easy is this to do in Drupal and how would one go about it? The site will offer both paid annual subscriptions and pay per article. The articles are HTML to be displayed seamlessly within the site, not PDF downloads. If this isn't straightforward in Drupal, does anyone know of another open-source CMS that offers this function?

Thanks,

Dave

v1nce’s picture

v1nce commented

This will require a little custom coding and drupal is the perfect solution for your requirements.
-------------------------------------
CommunityTraveler

Nikolai Thyssen’s picture

Nikolai Thyssen commented

Hi,

I really should get back to this thread, where the whole Drupal search began for us.

Shortly after the first post here, we build a blogging site on Drupal - as a test case. It worked great.

Now we have finally released our main site - and in the meantime a whole bunch of newspapers have switched to Drupal. You can see more about that at www.theopensourcenewspaper.org.

Best,
Nikolai