Apperceive

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

• http://theonion.com
• http://observer.com
• http://debatte.welt.de
• http://savannahnow.com
• http://pantherpress.org
• http://straight.com
• http://blufftontoday.com

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

• A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change
• 9 Ways for Newspapers to Improve Their Websites
• NAA Honors Top Newspaper Sites With Digital Edge Awards (Drupal-based site included)
• New York Observer - a newspaper site (Drupal case-study)
• Information.dk - Another Drupal Newspaper Site (Drupal case-study)
• Modules that might be useful for newspapers (groups.drupal.org wiki, free membership required)
• Drupal as newspaper site: a challenge
• Newspapers on Drupal (groups.drupal.org list)