Mark Royko + Associates

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.