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By Digital Circus on
One of the largest news websites, “mainichi.jp”, operated by Mainichi Shinbun Conpany Ltd, installed Drupal and introduced custom services in their Content Management System.
As of April 2012, the design and contents of ”Mainichi.jp” has been extensively revamped.
“Mainichi.jp” was launched as an integrated information portal for The Mainichi Newspapers in October 2007, and has been providing news coverage as well as entertainment information and information useful for daily lives based on its concepts: “trustworthiness”, “fun” and “ usefulness”.
It has been four and a half years since its launch, and now with the 140th anniversary of the first issue of The Mainichi Newspapers, the website has been extensively revamped for the first time.
They have applied the ground design based on “simple yet user-friendly ” concept in order to provide the news website where news are easy to read and the information you are looking for is easily searched. The logo has been redesigned by pursuing the beauty of typefaces to their utmost limit, and secured visibility and legibility with improved simpleness by applying the background based on white and allowing more margins for each content element. The website is designed so that the information is easily recognized and the articles users wish to read are easily accessed.
On the top page, the design applying “Dynamic News Box” which allows the headlines for the latest news and the photo images to be displayed for each block by news genre and switching their orders has been integrated so that the readers can feel the dynamism of the constantly updated website.
For the article pages, they have enhanced the visibility of the news by separating articles within a limited number of words, and also by enabling the enlargement of the photo images. In addition, functional enhancements to the featured images have been added, so news can be read visually by displaying the related featured images underneath the articles.
Also, HTML5 is now entirely supported in order to ensure the multidevice compatibility.
Why Drupal was chosen:
After the comparison with other CMS(s), Drupal has been selected for its functional advantages as indicated below:
block
Drupal enables to define the commonly used HTML parts such as headers/footers/sidebars on the website as “block”, and re-use it for the entire website.
taxonomy
Various tree-structured categories can be defined through GUI. Taxonomy allows flexible connection between templates and contents.
content type
Drupal enables to register user-specific “content type” by defining the items through administration screen in addition to the standard entry items for the contents (titles and body texts).
The great advantage of Drupal is its well-designed and robust architecture. It is simple but great for expandability with fine-tuned security and structured for customization.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
static HTML
It generates static HTML for each part based on the template and website configuration information from article data. For each requested article, it generates templates which need to be updated. Also, the associated lists, index page and archives are updated. Positioning of each HTML file is determined based on the website configuration information, which then be saved.
Multisite
Run multiple websites from a single CMS and a single shared Database.
Work Flow
Provides an automated workflow that can manage the review and approval of content before it is published.
Publication Schedule Setup
publish and unpublish content on specified dates and times.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Content Construction Kit(CCK) adds custom fields to nodes for Drupal6.
Workflow module allows to create arbitrary Workflows, and assign them to Entities.
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Sectors:
Media
