Liveblog: News-stand to Screen - The Cheap and Easy Route

Recently, Bill was approached by his boss, and asked to produce a re-designed website to go with the re-launch of Money Observer magazine.

In 2008 the company they worked for had acquired the magazine, and there was an existing website, which was very basic. When they acquired the magazine they did a very basic conversion to a Drupal site - in less than a month - because they used Drupal for their other sites. Now it was time for a big upgrade.

They were given a new design as a photoshop mock-up by the designer. ill then needed to decide how to build it in Drupal. In terms of the theme, this meant identifying the ‘regions’ that the design could be divided into - Top, Header, Nav, Content Top, Dontent, Right Sidebar and Footer. He likes to get the theme to a basic level quite early on in the project.

Next he used Views module to create the section pages of the site - the pages that would be directly accessed from top menu items.

Content Syndication

As they are part of a group of magazines - with Moneywise and Interactive Investor, they wanted to cross-syndicate content across the sites. They used FeedAPI module to take the RSS feeds from the other sites, and a view (with views bulk operations module) of these imported articles that allows the site editor to select ones they want to publish live on their own site.
They use Brightcove for hosting their video, having moved from Blip.TV. Video gets uploaded, and tagged for the publication its targeted at. Again, they used FeedAPI, with Feed Element Mapper to import a feed of these videos from Brightcove, and use a media plugin to display them on the magazine’s site.

PDF Versions

They have the magazine converted to PDF, and use Scribd.com, with a private account, to host it online. Using the Ipaper module they can embed these PDFs in the site, and make them available to users who are subscribers.

Email Newsletters

There was a an existing email newsletter, which a sub-editor sat down to write every Monday, and post it to subscribers. It was quite a lengthy labour-intensive process.
This was solved in the site redesign by creating a custom nodetype for this on the site, with a subject and intro paragraph. They then used nodereference to attach content from the site. The nodereference was filtered by views to present the nodes from the last 7 days.
They could then drag and drop to re-order the stories.

Key Modules Used

• Views
• FeedAPI
• Feed Element Mapper
• iPaper
• CCK
• Nodereference
• WYSIWYG
• Nice Menus
• Imagefield
• Imagecache
• Imagecache Canvas Actions
• Twitter
• Webform

They used the Zen base theme.