Newspaper Sites with Drupal

There seems to be more and more interest in using Drupal for newspaper sites and since several people have been asking, I wrote up some notes on that topic. Here are some example sites, features, resources and things to consider.

Some basic questions to ask include:

  • How will the site be used? What are the workflows or use cases?
  • What roles do different people play? Who are the actors in your story?
  • How many people do you expect to visit your site each day, week, month?
  • Do you have existing content or accounts that needs to be considered?
  • Do you need to integrate the newspaper site with other systems and services (e.g., advertisements, classifieds or paid subscriptions)?

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Drupal-based examples

Standard features

  • Basic content management (add/edit/publish pages, articles and blog posts, revisions, feeds, archives, aggregation, menus, files, headers, footers, sidebar blocks, search)
  • Basic user accounts, registration, passwords, profiles, forums, comments and personal blogs, friends, role-based access control and permissions (see below)
  • Typical newspaper roles:
    • Content contributors
    • Editors
    • Publishers
    • Administrators
    • Paid subscribers
    • Registered members
    • Visitors
  • Categories, keywords and taxonomy, free-tagging (e.g., News, Weather, Sports, Events, Business, etc)
  • Contact form

Additional features

  • Custom forms
  • Workflows, actions
  • Events, calendar
  • Groups/channels
  • Custom reports
  • Letters to the editor
  • Email newsletters
  • Search engine optimization
  • Social networking
  • Translation and multilingual
  • Site maps
  • More...

Widgets

  • Rotating Ads - sidebars and banner
  • Google Ads
  • Google Ad Sense
  • Local Weather
  • Calendar/Events
  • Related stories
  • Cartoons
  • Maps

E-commerce and external services

  • Paid subscriptions
  • Classified ads
  • Personal ads
  • Store

Media and content

  • Photos
  • Video
  • Podcasts/Audio
  • Content recommendation engines
  • Printing, PDF's

Other considerations

  • Administration (servers, site, data, community, support, affiliates, store, etc.)
  • Hosting, Bandwidth, Storage
  • Traffic and Reporting (average daily visitors, referrers, etc)
  • Theming (custom presentation templates)
  • Setup of initial system, custom fields and content
  • Export and Import of existing sites or data
  • Spam, Moderation, etc

Articles and resources

Tags:

Anther newspaper

Submitted by The Apperceiving Mass (not verified) on October 2, 2008 - 1:49am.

Check this out: www.theHvoice.com

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