Archives for October, 2008

Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard just coined a new term, ““Holovaty’s Law”, that I really like. Well, I believe he coined it because Google turns up no results for “Holovaty’s Law”.

The post linked as Holovaty’s Law, by the way, is a classic. If you haven’t read it and you’re interested in news and journalism at all, you need to.

Let me take the concept and run a little further with it. And thanks to Benton, the law already has it’s first corollary!

Theorem: Holovaty’s (First) Law of Online News

Adding structure to information makes it more valuable

1st Corollary

Adding structure to comments generates interesting data

Thoughts? Refinements? Other corollaries?

It seems like there’s a dearth of math geeks interested in journalism. Searches for “law of online news”, “fundamental theorem of online news”, “fundamental theorem of online journalism”, and “law of online journalism” all turn up nothing.

I wrote before about the new 34th Street Magazine website being in Alpha.

This is the first post of a series on what we did to Drupal to make it behave the way we want it to, how we implemented different features and to ask for feedback and advice on how to do future features.

To start out understanding Drupal, it’s important to understand that Drupal was designed and the developer’s focus is largely on creating flexible websites for communities, NOT for publishing or blogging. For instance, there isn’t a natural distinction between readers and administrators among the user roles. (Adding content is at node/add/* not admin/*) A lot of the work involved in setting up a site on Drupal is to work around the default values and settings and make it behave the way you want to.

Part of the joy of using Wordpress is that it’s defined for a very specific purpose and all the development work that goes into it is designed to make it easier to blog. With Wordpress, it takes very little work to go from a default install to writing your first post.

That’s not true for Drupal. No one would use Drupal with only its core functionality and the default settings. But with a little work, it becomes much, much more powerful and better suited for publishing a news website than Wordpress.

The problem I’m still struggling with now is how to import data into Drupal’s database. The database structure is quite complex compared to our current site, or a Wordpress site, but luckily the Content Construction Kit abstracts all of that when the site is being built. And that’s the topic of today’s post.

Nodes, Users and Custom Content Types!

Everything in our system is a node. Stories. Slideshows. Sections. Authors. Issues.

Content types

The CCK module lets us define all the different information each node needs and tie authors to articles and articles to sections and issues with node reference fields. Each content type is themed separately with a different template and the different ways that piece of content can be viewed are defined by a set of boolean PHP variables.

Our site uses the following CCK content types.

Article submission

At the database level

Creating a new field

When creating fields and content types, this is all you see. Pick data types and title them. For the most part, the rest of the process is completely opaque. To learn more about the database structure of CCK, there’s documentation in greater detail here.

There are several tables that store data for CCK fields.

• node – This table stores the unique nid of the node, and what type it is.
• node_revisions – This table stores the body content of the node, as well as data about which user created it, when it was revised and what’s in the teaser.
• content_type_[type] – If a content type has fields that are only used by that content type, this table contains the values of that field.
• content_field_[field] – Contains the values of that field.

Theming

A lot of the heavy lifting in Drupal is done at the theming layer. Luckily Zen makes it all much easier. That’s what I’ll be writing about next time. Some of the other upcoming posts will address how we handle images (Imagecache and CCK), how we theme our newsletters and how we handle multimedia.

What did you think of this post? Got more questions about our Drupal install? Leave a comment. The new website is at http://beta.34st.com, poke around and leave us some feedback!

How we did it in Drupal, Part 1 of X

1. How we did it in Drupal, Pt. 1 of X – The Data Structure
2. How we did it in Drupal, Pt. 2 of X – Theming with Zen

In the course of developing Drupal for the DP, we’ve been fortunate that we’ve had to write very little (themeing layer excepted) from scratch. Chalk it up to to the strength and robustness of the Drupal community that nearly every function we wanted, there was a module for.

One module that I did have to write from scratch was to replicate a function from College Publisher. After copy and pasting a story into CP’s interface, there was a button run all that doubled the line breaks, among other things.

Drupal wraps text separated by two line breaks with <p> tags and uses the <br /> tag to in-between text separated by one line break. By default, text copied out of InCopy only has one line break between paragraphs.

When Sean Blanda posted about the Temple News moving to Wordpress, this was one of the 6 problems he laid out as having.

Keep reading…

Exciting news on the CMS front.

34th Street Alpha

As some may know, The Daily Pennsylvanian web staff and I have been working on using Drupal to run our website and as a replacement for College Publisher on and off since the spring. The first part of that process is now nearly done and we have a nearly complete website for our magazine 34th Street!

We made the decision to go ahead and develop and launch a site in Drupal a few weeks ago and since then have been in a somewhat hectic mode scrambling to get all the launch features ready. A great deal of thanks goes to the folks who made the New York Observer site happen and wrote up how they did it.

Now it’s on to testing and training the other editors on how to use the system and looking for places to make the site work better, and make publishing easier. We also have to write a complete set of documentation for future and current editors on how to use the system, how to modify it, how to deal with Drupal upgrades and what to do in case things go wrong.

Keep reading…

Every post you see before this one (one exception) is imported from my old blog at http://albertgate.blogspot.com. This shiny new site is hosted by WebFaction and I’ve been very happy with them so far even if at $9.50 a month it’s a tad expensive for hosting a personal site. Their servers will let me play around with things like SVN and Django.

Keep reading…