Setup - Monthly Publication - 4 Editions

By Tampa-Web-Design on 5 Jul 2006 at 20:51 UTC

I'm a fairly experienced web designer/developer, but completely green to Drupal.

I've read numerous ways that publication/newspaper sites have been implemented, and I've installed Drupal 4.7 with a number of modules. However, I just can't seem to fully get my mind around how to implement the whole structure of the site. I'm hoping the community here can help me make sense of this so I can get up and running.

I need to setup Drupal to work with a monthly publication. The publication has 4 editions. Each edition covers a different geographic community and is published at different times throughout the month. Previous months need to be archived, and viewable in the same format as current editions - as if looking at the front page of a newspaper. Some articles will overlap between editions.

My vision of the setup...

Home page displays the title of the top 5 stories from each edition, plus links to the "home page" of each edition.

Once you click view an edition, the left menu contains several categories (Top News, Sports, Real Estate, Business, etc) each linking to the stories from that current edition.

Archived editions will be accessible from an archive link that leads to a page listing all archive editions.

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I've installed epublish, views, plus taxonomy, archive and some other modules. I get lost using the epublish module as new stories are assigned to categories using vocabulary/terms but I can't automate the assignment of the story to an epubish publication/edition. A bit confusing.

Can anyone throw me a bone?? :)

Comments

Re: Setup - Monthly Publication - 4 Editions

geoffb commented 6 July 2006 at 18:34

Mustang,

I've been where you are and share your pain. I am currently setting up a weekly newspaper site, switching over from a Coldfusion CMS, which I had pretty much put together myself (that's why I now need Drupal).

Drupal would have been tough for me but luckily I was able to hire a consultant to help me out.

On his suggestions, we used the CCK module to create a:

Full Article Content Type which had fields of Headline, Section, Abstract, Contributor, Image, Body, Activation Date, Expiry Date, Rank;

and an Issue Content Type which has fields of Issue title , Issue number, Activation date, Expiry Date, Cover image.

We have now created a custom Display_section module that will help us put like articles together.

We will use the img_assist and image_import modules to add images, the Survey module for our contests and front_page to put together our weekly homepage.

We're trying to integrate the Banner module with the open-source ad server phpAdsNew and we've also built a custom module to display classified ads that come out of our newspaper system.

I have much more learning to do myself (and am waiting for a good reference book to come out for programmers), but I hope this helps. Good luck with it.

Geoff

Simple alternative to e-publish in the works

mlncn commented 14 January 2008 at 12:00

The Agaric Design Collective is in the process of hacking out a simple alternative to ePublish for monthly newsletters. It's pretty closely tied to our client's needs, but can be customized pretty easily in the code, and we hope to make it more flexible and customizable through the user interface.

At present it's really only suited for bringing a number of articles in different sections together on one page (rather than separate pages for each section).

But it makes it possible to make an issue defined by a taxonomy, structured by sections defined in another taxonomy vocabulary, and present it on a highly themable page.

It could be modified to meet mustang's description above.

The code's available to those who ask. Custom implementations are available to those who pay! A more general module should be available to those who wait.

~ben

People Who Give a Damn :: http://pwgd.org/ :: Building the infrastructure of a network for everyone
Agaric Design Collective :: http://AgaricDesign.com/ :: Open Source Web Development

UPDATE: Work has been passed, for now, to another developer working for the Urban Alliance for Sustainability to build on and make much better:

http://www.nabble.com/html-newsletter-generation-module-tf4206833s15986....

^{benjamin, Agaric}