A common question many web designers, especially those new to Drupal, ask; refers to installing the right modules for setting up a newspaper site.
This question commonly arises when clients have a preferred CMS of choice and in this case Drupal. This article will highlight the more essential modules needed in attaining the functionality of a dynamic content-driven web portal. The listed modules are most effective under the Drupal 6 version.
Content Related
The CCK (Content Construction Kit) module allows for customization of the nodes from the administration side of the site by adding custom fields to perform or display certain features. This module is the most significant as it will assist in the development of teaser fields, secondary titles, content copyrights.
The next essential field to a newspaper site is how to handle images. The Imagefield module is one of the more popular image handling modules on Drupal. If you are looking for an alternative the Image module is another
Imagecache. The imagecache module is a tool used for cropping and resizing images before any content goes live. This reduces the need to manually edit and crop images to fit site dimensions. To use the imagecache module will require you enable its dependency known as the imageapi module.
Content Architecture
Views helps in displaying news stories in any style you like. This is essential especially for projects that require extensive front page design. This means for example that a front page can have top stories set in reverse chronological order while having a block that displays the latest stories related to the tag (taxonomy) highlighted.
Panels is a great way of adding regions on a larger page and then assigning different content to the different regions. The combination of views and panels is essential in developing a newspaper front page. Depending on your skill-set panels may not be necessary for all projects or may have little effect on projects with larger complexity.
Nodequeue provides a simple interface to create ordered groups of content – such as a collection of articles to display on the front page. Sub queues can be created, such as one queue for each issue or section of the paper. Nodequeue also provides quick links along with nodes to add to, or delete from relevant queues.
Interface
Wysiwyg is a popular choice for WYSIWYG editor, greatly expanding the functions of the standard text area. For journalist that are not familiar with HTML code a WYSIWYG module is essential for content writing. This module also makes the editors jobs less time consuming and places more focus on the structure and taxonomy of the news article.
Search Engine Optimization
Meta tags allows you to add meta tags to nodes. Think of it as enabling you to add different keywords to any news article on your site.
Site Map creates a site map that can be used by visitors, but is commonly used by visiting search engine crawlers.
Pathauto generates URL aliases based on variables you choose, for example example.com/section/title-of-content.