By luyendao on

This site is based entirely on the drupal engine and PHPtemplate with some minor modications - we wrote templates for various editorial areas, such top story, second top story, editorial picks, which also included various queries that used drupal's tracker, such as a rating system and date of submission.

There have been many many modifications to the 4.6 engine to make this site work more like a publishing engine than anything - from the front-end templates, to extending the submission forms to include custom form-fields.

We also built a light-weight classifieds system that is within the drupal system (all classifieds are registered drupal nodes).

This site has been in the workings for over 5 months of development, and today marks the official stable and bug-free (ahem) release.

I hope any aspiring writers/journalists will find this site of some use.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.6.x

Comments

NeoID’s picture

NeoID commented

Sorry for picking up a old thread, but this is amazing.. where can I get a kickstart on how to get the different columns/blocks? Are all news seperate "stories" or how does it work? :)

luyendao’s picture

luyendao commented

Hi NeoID! Thanks for writing, i'm happy to give something back to the drupal community after building a somewhat complex site ( i learned drupal along the way hehe).

Well there was a bit of custom coding here, but everything works inside of the drupal framework. In Drupal 4.7 (we used 4.6) a lot of that can be done with less effort. But what was unique about this site, was that a lot of the stories are editorially driven, that means their placement on the homepage for example had to be cms-driven as well. Not the default drupal way of sorting things chronologically.

Using the phptemplate system, and a new node type (much like flexinode), we just wrote a whole bunch of different modular templates, pretty much like you would do with drupal anyway, but a more fine-grain. So the top editorial story on the homepage is a template, the 2nd editorial story is a different template, and all the lists at the bottom are separate templtes (purely for look and feel) with some sql queries.

We used a custom node type, which just gave a bit more flexibility adding specific fields and such, and made sure all the drupal editor forms were tied in. For example we needed custom fields for a preamble, a pullquote, 8 images, different author types and so forth. In drupal 4.7 you can do some of that with a module called CKK and also Flexinode.

As for getting different column and blocks, this is just built in drupal functionality. The navigation for example is just hard-coded links, with some css to make it change states. The poll is also built in, we just customized it a bit (the module) to include a header. The rest are static blocks, nothing dynamic there.

I hope that helps a bit!

NeoID’s picture

NeoID commented

Thanks for your reply, everything helps in order to understand how Drupal works (or how people set up their sites).
I'll take a deeper look at some of the modules, maybe I get the hang on it after playing around for a while... :)

luyendao’s picture

luyendao commented

Drupal is a bit cryptic at first that's for sure - but the main thing in customizing pages is just playing around with it. Drupal is a bit weak on documentation, but this site, if you search the handbooks enough cover a number of examples.

4.7 has come a long way since 4.6, so it's a lot easier now than before. For example, the templating engine PHP Template is part of 4.7, and if you go into the /themes/engines/phptemplate folder you'll see a bunch of template files. That's a good start as you start customizing new ones...

for example the default node or content template for pages/stories is node.tpl.php - you can have one template that's node-page.tpl.php (phptemplate knows automatically you've created a page specific template), or node-blog.tpl.php for example.

Or you can put some logic forks in node.tpl.php to say, if this is a story render the node this way, if this is a blog this way, if i'm on the front page then only show the teaser with no links and so forth.

It takes a bit of experimentation, but if you know a bit of php, then really there's a lot you can do here! After trying out Mambo, Typo3 and Plone prior to this, i settled on Drupal because it's the most flexible in terms of writing web-standard html/css markup.

Best of luck.

zigma’s picture

zigma commented

I am impressed with your classified. Could you guide me how you got that setup?

luyendao’s picture

luyendao commented

The classifieds section is very simple, it doesn't rival or even come close to something like craig's list, the site focusing mainly on editorial stuff. All the classified types are unique drupal nodes, and there's quite a bit of custom coding here, and heavy use of custom templates, unfortunately i didn't program it, so i can't really walk you through it as a lot of this is custom stuff.

I hope in the near future that we'll release this back to the community so people can use it. Feel free to send me an email via my drupal contact, and as soon as we release it, i'll make sure you get a copy.

As you can imagine there's nothing really really fancy with it, but there were quite a few things that drupal didn't cover. Also just a reminder, that it was written for 4.6.

Lu

yaph’s picture

yaph commented

Really an impressive site. You have done a very good job, congrats!

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eserfc’s picture

eserfc commented

Hi. I´m brazilian journalist, and in Brazil we speak in portuguese, then, sorry by the bad english...

I´m looking for free option to use in Popular.inf.br, a periodical made for poor populations.
I would like to know if exists the chance to advantage part of your work in the site orato.com, exactly that this has a cost…

I don´t have great experience with Drupal, but we have much interest and we can learn it.

Best regards, and congratulations for your hard work.

Laurentvw’s picture

Laurentvw commented

I like it a lot. Must have taken a long time to build it. One thing that bothers me though, the title of the articles are not clickable.
By the way, how come the first letter of every article is so big? I mean, is that a module? I'd like to know.
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luyendao’s picture

luyendao commented

Thanks for the comments - yeah i agree titles should be clickable - a lot of the things on the site comes from a publishing / newspaper background of the people working on it, so it's not very new media in some of those respects.

The large first letter, the drop cap is manually put in for all the editorial stories, it's just a css style - it would be nice to make a module out of it though. Right now we're working on migrating everything to 5.0 which will be a challenge, but drupal 5 is so much better.

Here's the CSS for the dropcap, i found it on someone's site, but i forget which one - it's a bit tricky getting the font height and line-height, so this will save you time if you ever need it:

.cap {
float: left;
width: auto;
padding-right: 5px;
font-size: 68px;
line-height: 48px;
font-weight: normal;
color:#000;
font-family: Times New Roman, Times, georgia;
}