Running newspaper web sites on Drupal
It turns out there is a blog about newspapers using the Drupal content management platform. I’d really like to do a project on the platform and I am wondering if anyone out there has any advice on that to get me started.
On that same topic, Steve Yelvington wrote a post about a guy in Belgium who got Drupal to output into Adobe InDesign for a college print product.
February 12th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Now we’re talking.
Drupal is pretty great. I’m building a site there with help from a friend who’s familiar with PHP & SQL. Honestly, I’m leaning pretty heavily on him for the back-end detail.
Get the database servers running on your machine, get Drupal up and running and start experimenting. The best part is the documentation for Drupal is fantastic (like a lot of open source collaborations).
I’m rushing over to read about Drupal outputting to InDesign. Woo-hoo!
February 13th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
I haven’t setup a newspaper site but I would suggest getting XAMPP (windows version) from apachefriends.org which lets you install apache, mysql, php etc. onto your computer and have a local server. [This is in case you don't have it setup already and don't want to use a hosted account which you have to contantly upload files to]
Downloaded the latest Drupal 5 version [I don't recommend 6 because there are lots of modules that haven't been updated for it yet] and install. The setup instructions are pretty easy. If you decided to go the hosted route, then setup is even easier because you would just login to your account’s cpanel, look for fantastico, then find the link to install Drupal. I think it’s under ‘content management’ or ‘cms.’ [Note that fantastico takes a while to update so it will not have the very latest version of Drupal 5 with security fixes etc.]
Goto the Drupal themes page and look for the few themes that have a newspaper/magazine look. Off the top of my head, I remember Cutline and Grid. IF you decide to go go ahead with the project, getting a custom theme designed is another option.
I recommend that you read tutorials on Views. You will probably need to create views to customize the look of the frontpage. And I think you should also look at Panels.
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Drupal + InDesign seems like a great idea, so I will head over there too.