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July 2009
Drupal Modules for Newspapers
One of the things I like best about Drupal is that it offers a tremendous variety of modules that can take it from a relatively basic CMS to a heavyweight news publishing platform with just a few simple clicks of the mouse. I also like that there's a rather active communtity discussing and evaluating these modules, even keeping an archive of the best extensions to use in different news publishing situations.
Today provided a great example of these two traits working together. At the moment, I'm working on a fairly large magazine migration to Drupal, and was just thinking about how to achieve one of the publisher's requirements, when an email showed up saying that the Drupal Newspapers Group updated their list of recommended modules for newspapers. (The new list adds a few additional modules to the mix and removes a couple of others.)
While on its surface the list is just a set of modules, if you followed it closely, it would be an instruction manual for creating a newspaper web site. Download the modules found here and you have almost everything you need to put together your own CNN.com.
I do have a few gripes with the list: It's a little thin when it comes to multimedia and embedded content. I'm also a little bit skeptical of a few other modules. (For example, I don't recommend Search 404 for performance reasons, when you can install CustomError instead. Nik from Kineta Systems has a great post about this very topic. I think that IMCE is kind of a mess from a user interface perspective, too.)
Overall, however, it's a pretty clean list--definitely worth a look if you need to extend the functionality of core Drupal to a new publication site.
Yelvington
outside:
ffffound.com
outside:
Ubercart is Ubercool
Having reviewed dozens of different shopping carts, installing at least three different systems, and even having written a complete shopping cart from scratch, I can tell you that hands down, shopping carts are the most challenging options for site engineers, managers and owners. Sure, in the grand scope of things, there are much harder things to install on a website. But just in terms of day-to-day complexity, ecommerce is the winner. From inventory control to SEO, to payment gateways and customer management, nothing else online offers as many details to manage day after day after day.
That's why the shopping cart you choose to install is so important. There are dozens of them out there, and it's amazing how functionally limited some of them are. Many have terrible user interfaces, others have gigantic learning curves. Some are easy to use, but forget about some critical detail--say, inventory control or payment gateway integration.
That's why I'm so excited that Drupal has Ubercart, a system that's awfully close to being perfect, and in my mind, the single best open-source option for anyone looking for ecommerce on their web site. Read more »
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