By brianestadt on
I'm an advisor to a college newspaper and was told just last week that my budget had been slashed by half for the year. So we've opted to drop a newsprint edition altogether and migrate to the Web. We have a small staff (of which no one has programming experience) and I haven't bothered with web design since the mid-1990s when I could consider myself a mere neophyte HMTL coder. Here's my question: How quickly could a newbie like me expect to get a basic newspaper website up and running with Drupal?
At least initially, our campus Information Science students won't be involved ... but they'll likely come onboard at some point to help manage things.
Comments
Hi, Being still a new
Hi,
Being still a new member of the community, I would say 3-6 months... You will, I think, realize that you can do a lot with drupal. The problem is with time passing by, you always want more and more :)
But for the basic fonctions (organizing content, getting a decent forum, publishing articles, etc... it's actually quite easy and fast. But as with anything you have to take the time, etc...
I think Drupal is an easy and quite simple solution (even though people talk about a steep learning curve, it's not so steep in my opinion)...
If you have any more specific questions i'll be happy to help you!!
patchak
I would have to add that the
I would have to add that the basic presentable site can be achieved faster than 3-6 months... But you will feel in control in that time... as for the presentable part... just choose a theme you like in the beginning and the "simple presentable site in drupal can be achieved actually quite fast!!!
Thanks for clearing that up
Whew. The 3-6 months comment scared me. Your follow-up put me at ease, however. Thanks for the comments.
tough for anyone to assume
tough for anyone to assume how long it would take you to do it.
It would certainly depend on the scope of the project. A news related site, is pretty easy to workout, however if you get into themeing and you need specific blocks to be written then it could take longer to become a fully realized piece of work.
I highly suggest taking Drupal for a test run, so that you can better guage what would be needed that isnt already provided by the framework itself, for what you want to accomplish.
there are quiet a few modules in the repository that you would want to look into as well, depending on the level of user involvement you want to implement.
@VeryMisunderstood Very
@VeryMisunderstood
Very realistic advice, I'd say the same.
My situation
Well, for this semester, the only user involvement would be a weekly poll question. Other than that, the site would contain just stories (we're a branch campus, so our weekly paper would have 8-10 stories per week), a few ads, and photos. We're looking very barebones out of a need to get online ASAP (no paper's being printed in the meantime) and because we lost a majority of staff to graduation. Everyone involved is OK with it being barebones (as long as it's clean and well-organized barebones) to start with; we just don't want to create more work for ourselves when the site evolves thanks to the involvement of Information Sciences students and a large news staff next semester and subsequent years.
Thanks for the information.
3 weeks to 3 months conditionally
I generally tell people three weeks to three months depending on their skills and goals. It may be quicker or longer but you have several potential skillsets that installing and setting up Drupal really ends up forcing you to confront.
With many CMS's they have an internal strucutre and framwork for that structure that you are tied to but also then . These are often desended from old style heireirchy navigation sites and modified slightly from there.
With Drupal you get it installed and it just sits there waiting for you to tell it everything. Site navigation, structure, what content where.... everything. So, you sort of need design skills for information architecture, maybe a little php (I've gotten away with little to none for years now), definitly design for your theme but that also goes back to information architecture for your site structure. Awareness of layout principals, color (theme)....
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Words of wisdom
Though I appreciate all you said, thanks for your signature ... "Test site, always start with a test site." I'm adding that one to my checklist.
Layout principals shouldn't be a problem, since I've been doing newspaper design for the past seven years. For my "day job," the newspaper company that I work for uses Drupal for its site management, so hopefully I can lean on the webmaster for a little php advice.
Thanks.
Can be done in 4-12 weeks
If you just go by defaults and a "good enough" mentality.
I soft launched www.idekampanjer.se about 4 weeks after I installed Drupal on that domain.
My drupal experience before installation was about 4 weeks. This is "a few hours a day" weeks and
not 25-7 hacker weeks. No programming performed. Just added a few modules. Your mileage may wary.
Projects right now:
www.publishyourbook.se - För läsare. För fattare. (Swedish only)
www.idekampanjer.se - Tävlingar som belönar idéer. (Mainly Swedish, some English)
Drupal as journalistic tool
Very interesting discussion. I'm a former journalism teacher, reporter and editor -- now co-editor of energybulletin.net (as-yet undrupalled).
I think Drupal is the way to go, especially in an educational setting like yours. As several people have said, you can do anything from simple newsletters
http://www.idekampanjer.se/
http://lewiselementary.org/
http://rooftopgardens.ca/en
http://www.pampclub.org/
to high-rolling professional sites:
http://www.theonion.com/content/
http://new.savannahnow.com/
http://www.orato.com/home
http://leovia.com/ (not up at the moment)
A design that I particularly like is http://www.indymedia.be/ . Professional looking, yet relatively simple to implement (hat tip to web developer Bruno de Bondt).
It's too bad about your budget being cut, but perhaps some good can come of it. You and your students will be thrown into the world of online journalism and (perhaps) Drupal. I'm convinced that this is the future for journalism.
If your students can get online experience, I think they will find more jobs open to them. I know in the volunteer field, there are a multitude of opportunities.
It would be interesting to read more about your experiences as your newspaper makes the transition. I hope you'll post your thoughts on the web somewhere!
Bart
If anyone's wondering...
It took 20 days from this first forum query from me to get the site online at www.UPGinsider.com. After that it took about another week to tweak things. Still have some work to do, but just three weeks for one person with absolutely no current website management experience to build and unveil a site? Give all the credit to Drupal and the helpful posters in here. If you have any feedback, please drop in here: http://drupal.org/node/88362