By ChrisHasenpflug on

Alright guys, here's your chance to convince me to use Drupal for my project.

I am working on a website which hopes to flourish as a sports news website for a university. The site is www.o-state.com and is made up of fans, students and alums of Oklahoma State University. We have a few authors on the site that contribute articles as you can see on the current front page. We are working on a total redesign of the site and are trying to incorporate a Content Management System to this. What were looking to do is turn this into a SportsIllustrated.com for OSU. Our front page will have different "zones" that will show headlines or article excerpts based on certain criteria.

Basically what I'm needint to do is find a system that will select headlines matching certain criteria. For example here's a few of the quereies I would be making:

  • Select the most recent story from the Headlines category and include it's excerpt.
  • Select the next 10 stories in the Headlines category and show its Title, Sport Category (for displaying and incon), Author and Date
  • Select the most current article from Author #1 and include it's exceprt.
  • Select the most current article from Author #2 and include it's exceprt.

We'll also have sub-pages for different sports so I'll need to assign multiple categories to articles.

The articles will of course have perm-links with the whole article content, possibly paginated and including images. Commenting is not necesary for our setup as this will all be done in the forums (I plan on hacking the system so that when an article is submitted a new forum topic is created and linked to from the article).

I've worked with MoveableType and WordPress in the past. WP is pretty much out for this project as making it select the headlines for inclusion on the main page would require serious code writing. MT would probably work since I can make it select articles from a certain category, but we'd like something free if at all possible.

So what do you guys think?? Is Drupal the right solution for us?? Will I have to hack a lot or is Drupal a drop-in solution for me?

Comments

ti’s picture

ti commented

Drupal can do what you say, but some "installation is required." It won't be a drop-in solution. You can browse the Drupal based sites and see for yourself what Drupal can do and what others have done with Drupal. Ecademy and Tipic are two very complex Drupal based sites. If you yourself can't hack the code because of time or other constraints, you might be interested in many of the professionals who offer Drupal related services including customizing Drupal to your needs. Drop one of them a note and they'll be glad to talk to you about your project.

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

Read about the Drupal taxonomy system - this is probably how you will make your different zones or headline categories. There are many ways to display x number of articles in a given taxonomy, and you have administrative control over how long the teaser text should be. You can even link an article to multiple taxonomy terms (zones) in case it overlaps.

As for the forum creation, there is very little to hack. Drupal forums are little more than the comments that one can add to any Drupal node (article), so the easiest way would be to have two different views for your content nodes; one with only the article, and one with only the comments. In this way, it'll look like the article has a forum. You have total CSS control over how these look. Check out the theme phptemplate - I know that you can easily turn things on and off (comments, main content node).

Check out the modules Image and Node Image to see how you can allow your authors to include images with their articles.

Additionally, you will soon have the next Drupal release available: rumor has it Drupal 4.4.2 will be out in two weeks. Upgrading a Drupal installation is usually easy (only gets hard if you have made major changes to the code).

Good luck deciding,

- Robert Douglass

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visit me at www.robshouse.net

ChrisHasenpflug’s picture

ChrisHasenpflug commented

Thanks for the info. I've looked at phptemplate and it seems like something i can integreate quite easily with my site design.

But here's my hangup. How do I get Drupal to do what I want it to do? Like I said, on my main page I want to have different "zones." I need to be able to tell it to put the most recent Top Story here, and put the most recent 5 headlines there, and then this authors most recent article there.

Can somebody point me to information like that?? I'm just not findin the information I need.

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

Can you code PHP? One of the great things you can do with Drupal if you have PHP chops is create a page (create content->page), and change the radio "Type" from HTML to PHP. Then you can do the queries you need to get exactly the content you want (search the site for info on how to do this, it is covered many times). Then, under administer->configuration, you can set the new page as your default homepage. That is one possibility.

Another possibility would be to create blocks for each of the zones you described. You'll probably have to write custom queries for those too, but then you can enable the blocks to appear on the front page and use CSS or change the template (main.tpl.php in the phptemplate/default folder) to display those blocks where you want them.

There are many different ways that you can achieve what you want... all of them will require some php and css knowledge on your part. There is probably no way that you can achieve what you want only using the administrative controls built into Drupal. If you can code, however, your task will be easier with Drupal than with almost any other system I've seen.

- Robert Douglass

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visit me at www.robshouse.net

ChrisHasenpflug’s picture

ChrisHasenpflug commented

Yes, I know PHP. I'm quite familiar with it.

I think the blocks for zones is what I would do and then include the zones in the template. Enabling the blocks in the administration interface is out of the question since it only allows left/right positioning.

So I'm understanding a bit more now. What I don't know and can't seem to find any information on is creating blocks. What SQL statements do I use?? How are blocks included in the template (manually not through the admin interface)?? The questions go on. I can't seemt to find any details. Are there some resources you can point me to?

Let's start simple is my logic (of blocking) here correct? I need to create a block that selects the most recent frontpage article so it can be displayed with a photo and excerpt. I will then have a second block that will need to select the 5 most recent (actually 2-6) articles to display as "past news headlines".

That doesn't seem difficult to do, but I can't find any information on how to get started.

briandburnham’s picture

briandburnham commented

Nice to meet a fellow Cowboy. I'm getting my MBA at OSU, and I'm converting a couple sites to Drupal.

Brian Burnham
http://brianburnham.com