Setting up a web publication with Drupal
Posted on January 13, 2008
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Free-software — free as in freedom, not as in free beer. Richard Stallman, the inventor of the concept of free software (and most of the free software itself during the 80s), could not have imagined, thirty years ago, that free software could have had today such a big success.
And if the online publication London Project (LP) was successful, that’s also thanks to him. About five years ago high quality free software for the management of user generated content websites (Content Management System, CMS) became available, free of charge and free to be modified, for individuals or communities willing to set up an online publication.
If the code is well written, any advanced user can discover the bugs (defects in the code), correct them, add features, and make all that available to the user-community. That is what happened with the LP — apart that the bugs we discovered were not solved.
Although I had developed community web-sites with different CMS (php-nuke, mambo server, wordpress), I never used drupal, the CMS used for the LP. We choose Drupal as advised by Chris Brauer. We immediately saw that the community behind was huge (the graph shows google searches of the word drupal, in red, and phpnuke, in blue), and loads of modules were available to build the ideal CMS.
A book recently published by APress (Building on-line community with Drupal), and the fact that increasingly more communities are using Drupal as CMS, convinced me definitely.
Here is how, after three weeks of hard work, Mattia Bagnoli and I created our own Drupal distribution for the LP.
- Panel. Editors are responsible for the layout of their page. There is a top box, normally with no more than the excerpt of a single story, then three or two columns with other excerpts, below.
- Workflow. An article can be written by anybody — it does not mean it is published. Authors promote their article from Draft to Review. At this point the article will automatically appear on the “to be edited” page. Once the editor has edited it, it promote it to Rework. The article will then appear on the “to be published” page. A rework can be edited one more time by the author (a comment box contains the editor’s doubts), then can be promoted to Published. Once it is published, the editor of the corresponding section will put it on the front page.
- Categories. With the use of the so called taxonomy we set up a way to have every week a different issue. Plus any article is visible by the right editor for the right section
- Authorship. Users can sign the piece as they like.
- Profiles. Anybody subscribed to the site can provide information about him/her, included a picture.
- Contact. e-mail address are not shown (in order to avoid spam). A form permits to send messages to any user or group (e.g. to the editors, the web team etc)
- WYSIWYG editor. Writers have a real word-processor embedded in the browser. They can upload and modify pictures’ layout
- Translation. The same article can be provided in different languages.
- Search. Every hour the whole content is indexed and available through a search form
- Slide-show. In case many different pictures are available, they can inserted in a slide-show.
- Statistics. Statistics are available through Google Analytics.
Other customizations are not considered.
Every editor of any section was able to work with the system after two or three days. Users were able to upload pictures, modify the layout of a page without destroying the whole layout, insert audio, video (through YouTube or Video Google). After two weeks, the system (i.e. the software plus the people) was working like a clockwise machine. Just when the project finished.
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