Ask the editor of an online news publication for their most wanted features in a content management system, and you'll likely end up with the following list:
- It should be easy to use so that the editorial team can create special sections and make content changes without having to call a team of programmers.
- It should be flexible enough to change as the demands of the publications change.
- It should allow visitors to easily find relevant articles, images and multimedia.
- It should encourage readers to engage in conversations so that the publication is always lively, current and relevant.
In September, 2011, MR+A completed the relaunch of two web sites that made these goals a reality for two Chicago publications: Catalyst Chicago, and The Chicago Reporter. Both projects converted the magazines to the Drupal content management system, re-organizing all blog posts, archives and graphics from a previously installed custom-built CMS. The transition allowed the publications to deliver breaking news faster, be more responsive to readership and put more opportunities for online coverage directly into the hands of its editors and production staff.
Background
Both Catalyst Chicago and The Chicago Reporter are operated by the Community Renewal Society, a Chicago-based non-profit organization whose mission is to "inform, organize and train communities and individuals to advocate for social and economic justice." Catalyst-Chicago focuses on issues in public education, while The Reporter provides coverage of race and poverty. Both magazines maintain active print editions.
Prior to the conversion, both magazines used an in-house content management system originally developed in 2005. While the previous system had been updated several times to meet changing requirements, editorial work flow remained approximately the same: Under the previous CMS, web content was directly copied from the print editions and grouped together by issue date. In its original incarnation, to add a story to the site, the production department would first create an issue, then add content, with each story directly associated to a single edition.
While this architecture was sufficient for creating an online content repository, it wasn't responsive enough to handle fast-breaking news coverage, or to create relationships between stories based on tag-related subject matter. In fact, almost as soon as the original system was launched, changing technologies and trends in online journalism initiated a constant stream of update demands.
Soon after launch, one of the first new requirements was the ability to add blogs posts. While this wasn't a difficult addition, architectural limitations in the old system meant that there was no easy way to create relationships between the new blog posts and story archives. While it was possible to find related content through an internal site search, it was difficult to see the connections linking blogs, articles, issues and graphics together.
Other demands hinted at the need for a better publishing system, as well. One of these was increased flexibility. If an editor wanted to create a special section — or even if they just wanted to move a block of content to a different part of the page — a call had to be placed to development, slowing down the entire editorial production process.
CMS Evaluation
In response to these limitations, CRS team members working with Mark Royko evaluated several leading CMS systems. While budgetary requirements dictated Open Source technology, other considerations included overall adoption by the publishing industry; the speed and regularity of system updates and bug fixes; the overall engagement of the development community; the availability of training materials, and the overall ease of use for low- or non-technical users. The contending systems included Wordpress, TypePad, Drupal and Joomla.
Of all the evaluation criteria, probably the most important was system flexibility. Over the years both the Chicago Reporter and Catalyst have collected unique archives of stories and data, and since the early days of each web publication, both editorial teams have sought to make it easier for readers to reach this content. This concept is more ambitious than just using internal search tools to look for individual stories. Rather, the goal has always been to provide dynamic pages of content pulled from separate sections of the magaazines.
Under this scenario, for example, a Catalyst visitor might enter a zip code and immediately retrieve a dynamically generated page with demographic information about nearby schools; stories about the community; school preformance data and other statistics uniquely available through the site.
In short, the editorial team needed a system that went beyond day-to-day news publishing: the ideal CMS should also act as a data framework.
Drupal Selection
Like other CMS systems, Drupal allows editors to post pages and articles "out of the box." But the system's modular architecture and wide variety of functional modules allow it to act more as a content framework than a traditional CMS. (For example, by using the Views module -- one of the many freely-available system expansion modules --editors can create complex data queries and display the results in content 'blocks' throughout the site. This is an extremely powerful feature for content editors; one that previously would only be available to the an experienced database programmer.)
Drupal can also be modified to handle almost any application requirement, from customer relationship management to the deployment of private user groups. Drupal's modular architecture allows easy integration with CiviCRM, for example, an open source customer relationship management solution favored by a variety of non-profit organizations.
Finally, Drupal is used by an impressive group of high-profile online publishers, and there are dozens of case-studies explaining why Drupal was selected and how it was configured.
Based on these selection criteria, Drupal was the clear CMS solution.
Site Architecture
The first step in the migration process was to determine how data would be structured on the new site. Drupal allows developers to organize content through a number of different methods. The most basic includes pages — which display as traditional web pages — and articles, which can be displayed as individual pages, or as items in a list. This isn't too exotic -- just think of a blog with posts (articles) and pages.
Articles and pages are the two most basic data structures — or content types — found in Drupal. But they are only the start of how data can be organized. Drupal lets users create an unlimited number of content types to act as containers for more specialized content. For example, if a magazine wanted to create a restaurant review section, they might create a 'restaurant' content type containing the establishment's name and description, along with additional fields for addresses, and even five-star ratings. Items having this content structure can then be displayed in list format, which in this example might form the basis for a restaurant review section.
One of the first new content types created in these projects was the "Issue" type, which held a description of the print issue, the publication date, and a link to the PDF download. Tags were also added that specified the issue's topics, and served as a convenient way to associate individual articles by subject matter, (While it was no longer necessary to strictly organize stories by the issue, this structure provided a simple container for readers to browse back-issues and see the focus of editorial effort by subject matter grouped in tags.)
These tags served as one of the foundations for organizing content for the magazines, and are one of Drupal's most powerful tools. While tagging isn't unique to Drupal, it's system of unlimited tagging across any content type makes it extremely useful for content publishers. In Drupal jargon, this is called the Taxonomy system. These are organized by "Vocabularies" and "terms." (An example of a vocabulary might be 'Department', whose terms include 'Opinions,' 'News,' 'Sports,' etc.)
If content types allow data to be related by structure, tags allow content to be groupd by subject matter. They are the glue that tie content together, allowing it to be organzied by any criteria across any kind of content.
While this capability sometimes causes confusion for people new to Drupal, it is at the core of why it's such a great tool for online publishers. Since there's no arbitrary limit on how tags are applied across content types, they can be used to gather and display content from any area of the site. That means theres a simple way for editors to link together blog posts, infographics, audio files or back issues based entirely on subject matter. In the eariier scenario of entering a zip code to get neighborhood school information, neighborhood tag could be used to assemble all related data into a unified page. This could result in a single page that shows all stories, discussions, statistics, etc., leveraging content based on user need.
This -- among other Drupal tools -- provides an astonishingly powerful way to organize magazine content.
Special Modules and Themes
The Drupal configurations used by Catalyst and the Chicago Reporter are loosely based on OpenPublish, a Drupal distribution developed by Phase2 Technology with the support of Thomson Reuters. Drupal distributions are collections of modules configured for specific purposes, and OpenPublish is a package developed to for online publishers.
While neither magazine uses that distributions, some of the modules available in that package were added for additional functionality. Among the most interesting was the 'Node Relationship' module, which allows streamlined production of related content. Both publications also use the Context and Context UI modules to let the production department more easily manipulate content blocks throughout the site.
While converting data structures from the previous CMS, Drupal's Migrate module was invaluable. Migrate provides a consistant, programmatic approach for mapping fields in the legacy content database to corresponding Drupal data structures. More importantly, it allows full rollbacks when data structures change or when errors occur during import. Migrate greatly simplifies the production process, cutting down the time to import content from months to weeks. It would be almost impossible to complete a migration project of any appreciable size without this module.
Both Catalyst Chicago and The Chicago Reporter use subthemes of Blueprint CSS, a grid-based css framework that allows rapid development of HTML page layouts. Using Blueprint together with the Context Layout Module makes creating special pages or sections extremely easy. While there are other grid systems available for Drupal, Blueprint is still one of the most feature-rich, and easiest to deploy. The Catalyst Chicago theme was modified for use with the Skinr module, which lets production specialists apply preformatted CSS styles to content blocks.
Future Plans
Both migration projects were started at around the same time Drupal 7 made it's official debut. Since some of the modules used in these projects were still being developed for Drupal 7, the safest development plan was to move to version six first, but plan on moving to D7 as soon as possible. In the few short months between launch of the magazines, the development community has made Drupal 7 far more stable, and plans are in progress for the next transition.
If you'd like to learn more about using Drupal for news publishing, please contact Mark Royko.