By therobyouknow on

Requesting the creation of a user/developer group for the fantastic Studio Multimedia France 24 / RFI pen source modules for the france24.com site.

I have some unanswered questions below which I would invite people to give thoughts on as I will ALSO TRY to ANSWER them MYSELF as I experiment with these modules.

Is anyone actually using them?

Now what? :-
How do you get started with them? I've uploaded and installed all of them to my development site but now what?

How do I actually use these modules, maybe create new content using CCK?

How do I define page layouts and a facility for uploading content to them? For example,
Front page, article page, photo galleries etc.

I want to categorise my content, using taxonomy and list articles in a category in various boxes, e.g. entertainment, arts, history etc. I might want to make the listing of one box be conditional on the other, for example if an article is listed in latest, then it is not also repeated in the category boxes.

I want to know how and where to place items on a page, using panels, views, etc.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x, Drupal 7.x

Comments

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

http://groups.drupal.org/newspapers-on-drupal began as a discussion specific to newspapers but now embraces all news media, including Web-only startups.

The France24 folks are members and you're welcome to have a discussion there.

ndeschildre’s picture

ndeschildre commented

Hey!

Indeed, I do not think it would be wise to create a group for that, it will be of too low traffic. Better to do as proposed by yelvington.
As to how to use these modules, it would be indeed good to write a big piece of paper summarizing how each piece work together. Maybe a task for the next Drupalcon?
Meanwhile you still have the README inside the modules, which are quite complete and that I urge you to read.

Cheers,
Nicolas

dellis’s picture

dellis commented

We just launched a new portal where I used uberimage, formatter selector, views cck formatter and utilities (of course). Uberimage by itself is a "must-have" for any site with a significant number of content creators where you want to have a bunch of imagecache sizing options available for a single field. CCK Formatter Selector is a really really convenient way to take advantage of CCK formatters (I hadn't really figured out how to actually use them in a dynamic way before finding this module).

Uberimage should be used in any/every node form--any content type where you have image fields. Basically you can assign various imagecache size/cropping presets to the imagefield that you want within the configuration of the field. Then you can theme the various displays of that node (full page, teaser, related link blurb, etc) with the different presets using uberimage's theme functions (found in the readme). It is really valuable and saves tons of questions/issues with how to use "Gimpshop" or "Aviary", etc. It literally makes it easy enough for beginners to add great custom cropped images to their site. The ability to override the specific images that are available at the different preset sizes is a really well thought out option---so for the small "square" version of an image you can actually replace it with an entirely different image. It helps your content look fresh when presented in a different display.

Formatter Selector, again, is a great module that really filled a need I had with this portal. The portal has pages and "editions" and it archives the editions everytime they are created (edition nodes)--a business-driven goal intended to preserve the context of the content from a particular day, etc. Our "editors" wanted to be able to customize the way stories are displayed on a daily basis (and even the layout of the site). So I created an edition content type that basically mimics the drupal block-assignment concept--I have a number of collapsible regions that contain a multiple nodereference field--those references connect with the page content type (which uses uberimage). Each nodereference field--or group of fields, depending on whether I'm using 1 CCK formatter to render a number of fields, or whether I want each page-reference to be customizable by the editors--can be formatted using the convenient drop-down selector of the various CCK Formatters that have been made available to that field in the content type admin (which again is GREAT stuff and well done). I've basically printed the resulting themed page references in themed "regions" within the content type's tpl.php file--this seemed the most straightforward way to do things, since the regions would be available (but not necessarily used) for each edition. As a result, I can create (and have non-technical people create) many different versions of edition pages. Now to be honest, I've only really created a handful of formatters at this point (I have something like 14) but the ability to create new node-display templates and easily hook them up to existing fields as additional options for my editors to use is insanely useful. So far, I've added 3 options post-soft-launch (a couple of weeks ago) and within a day the new formats are being used--it is almost like giving them a new "toy" and they almost always have to test it out. The formatter selector module is really most valuable when used in conjunction with the "Custom Formatters" (http://drupal.org/project/custom_formatters) module. There are probably other ways to do this, because this is drupal, but this was the way that worked really well for me. See screenshot here.

The views views CCK formatter module is also really useful, in that it provides new display options for views results (you can use any of the formatter/templates you have). I use this to help editors search for the recent content that matches their searched parameters.... displaying this in a dialog box on the edition edit page; and it provides the kind of "front-end polish" that you rarely see in the content admin side of things... very neat little touch and easy to use.

You can see some of these things in action at http://www.yourpublicmedia.org.