Still not sure if building your Web site with Drupal is the right choice?  Consider this: Drupal won the Hall of Fame Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards.  Drupal had previously won the 2007 and 2008 Best Overall Open Source CMS Award.

I’m a little late in posting this (ok, a lot late), but the thousands of people who contribute to Drupal in so many ways all have my respect, congratulations, and support.

That’s exactly what the nonprofit news organization SF Public Press did when it built SFPublicPress.org.

Although the startup focuses on the stories that other news organizations aren’t covering, it still has to compete for the attention of today’s tech-savvy readers who have many options for receiving news.

To do that, SFPublicPress.org offers much more than news articles on the Web. Among other things, the site features:

• audio and video to help convey what text can’t;
• an interactive media gallery that gives readers new ways to dive into stories;
• easily-accessible bio pages for reporters and editors so it’s clear who is behind each story;
• RSS feeds to keep readers informed as soon as news hits the site.

With all these features and more, it’s hard to believe that building the site took fewer than 60 development hours. (It’s hard to believe even for me — and I built it!)  But that’s the power of the Drupal content management system, and that’s why I recommend it as the platform for many of my clients’ sites.

How We Did It

Analysis: When SF Public Press was formed in 2008, originally as The Public Press, the staff launched a blog-style Web site on Drupal 5. By the time I met with them in Spring 2009, they had expanded their coverage and were ready to move away from the blog format.  They also wanted to add multimedia features so they could tell stories with more than just text.

But they weren’t sure whether to do that by adding modules to their existing site or starting over on a pre-assembled Drupal distribution designed especially for news sites, like ProsePoint or OpenPublish.

So the first step was to install and review both ProsePoint and OpenPublish.  While both showed a lot of promise, the staff ultimately felt that either option would require a lot of deconstructing of unwanted features and customizing of others to make the site truly “theirs.”  Instead, they opted to build on what they had and incorporate the components they liked best from ProsePoint and OpenPublish and other news sites.

Upgrade: To get started, the site needed to be upgraded from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 so we could make use of improved functionality in the latter version, such as Views 2. So I began with a full audit of the site’s modules, uninstalling the ones that were no longer needed and researching the upgrade paths for the ones we were clearly keeping.

Fortunately, the process is well documented.  Unfortunately, it’s tedious.  After upgrading the core, I upgraded each contributed module one by one, thoroughly testing for problems after each update.  The Views needed to be rebuilt as we were going from Views 1 to Views 2.  But ultimately, I didn’t run into any unexpected problems.

Design/Theme: The organization didn’t have the resources to hire a designer, but the staff had liked ProsePoint’s theme, which was based on a Wordpress theme called The Morning After. Since the theme is freely available under the Gnu Public License (like Drupal), we used it as our starting point for the new SFPublicPress.org.

Through iterative changes to templates and stylesheets, the current theme manages to be unique while maintaining many of the clean, authoritative elements of the original theme.

Featured Articles: Good news sites, like good newspapers, draw a reader’s attention to the most interesting or most important articles each day by giving them top billing.  But when the blog format was in place on The Public Press site, all articles had the same “weight”.  New articles simply appeared at the top of the homepage and were pushed down as the staff published additional articles.

The new site gives editors much more control, thanks to the Nodequeue module.  The “queue” we set up lets editors select up to four articles to feature on the homepage.  The articles can be placed in any order and can stay in the queue as long as editors feel they’re relevant.

Images, Video, and Audio: The staff is well aware that, to go beyond traditional news presentation, news on SFPublicPress.org must be a multimedia experience.  So we used CCK to add a full set of media fields to the article creation form in Drupal.

Authors and editors can upload multiple images and apply captions.  With the help of Imagecache and Views the images are then automatically resized and displayed in a neat column to the right of the article body.  Clicking on an image pops up a larger version, thanks to Thickbox.

For video, we used the Embedded Media Field module, which allows editors to easily insert videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and other video sites.  And for audio, we used SWFTools to insert an audio player directly into article pages.

For articles with multiple media attached, editors can determine which item gets promoted in the teaser on the homepage.

Media Gallery: The site’s media gallery provides an additional means, besides headlines, to draw readers into stories. Much like “pull quotes” in a magazine, the thumbnails on the homepage catch a reader’s attention and invite them to click and explore further.

Building the gallery was an interesting challenge because it was important to the staff that the media gallery not only include images from the stories, but also videos.

Normally, this would have been easy with Drupal’s Views.  But the site’s use of embedded videos rather than uploaded videos meant that Views didn’t recognize the videos as files.  To intersperse embedded video thumbnails with standard image files required the development of a custom, complex SQL query to pull together all the needed components.

Other than the code needed for this, and the modifications made to the theme, the site uses very little custom code overall.  The majority of the site’s functionality is provided by contributed modules.  This is a testament to the power of Drupal.

Topic Navigation: Another entry point into the articles is the topic navigation just under the header.  The navigation is based on the “topic” taxonomy that the staff uses to categorize articles.  Readers can use the dynamic menus to drill down to a specific subtopic of interest (thanks to the Nice Menus module).

In particular, SF Public Press’s navigation shows how a Web site can use its taxonomy to set itself apart.  Whereas traditional news media often have taxonomies that feature “Sports”, “Business”, “Entertainment”, and so on, SF Public Press features clearly local topics like “Civics”, “Streetscape”, “Schools”, and “Diversity”.

Migration: Because editors continued to publish articles to Public-Press.org while SFPublicPress.org was being built, we had to deal with a common content migration problem: how to get the published articles into the new site with as little manual data entry as possible.  Likewise, new user accounts had been created on Public-Press.org that needed to be moved.

The solution involved taking a snapshot of the node, node_revisions, and users tables from the database of the old site and loading them into the new site’s database.  The staff still needed to go through the articles on the new site to manually “massage” each one — for instance to move images and video into the new media fields. But having the article records already in the system with the titles and body text in place helped ease the burden and provided a foundation to build on.

An Iterative Process

One of the wonderful things about working with SF Public Press is that the organization sees the development of its Web site as an iterative process rather than a monolithic construction project.  No doubt this is one of the factors in the project’s success.

Instead of specifying an exact feature or solution, project leaders often describe a “problem” — for instance,  needing a way for editors to insert videos into articles.   Because Drupal has such a broad base of freely available contributed modules, there are usually one or more “solutions” that can be prototyped without writing any custom code (such as the Embedded Fields module).    The staff then tests the solutions and notes the changes they’d like to see.  This allows them to add new features to the site rapidly and at low cost.

Indeed, SF Public Press continues to look for ways to improve the site.  It will soon be conducting focus groups with readers to find out how the new site is working for them, and there are sure to be changes as a result.

If there is one thing a news organization can’t do enough of these days, it is adapt.  With Drupal under the hood of its Web site, SF Public Press won’t have any problem with that.

To read more, see Drupal founder Dries Buytaert’s post on the subject:
http://buytaert.net/whitehouse-gov-using-drupal

And see also the writeup at techPresident.com:
http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/whitehousegov-goes-drupal

If you’re a Comcast Internet customer and you try to visit a Web site that doesn’t exist, you’re likely to get sent to a page like the following:

Want to opt out?  Comcast makes you dig up your modem’s MAC address and submit that along with your email address.  I’m off to go look at my modem.

(Oh, dear clients, don’t worry. The video isn’t about you — it’s about other people’s clients. You’re the best, of course! ;-)

But telling an entrepreneur they should adopt an amorphous “platform” that they’ll have to “build on” before they have a working Web site is admittedly unconvincing.  And it doesn’t do Drupal justice.

Unfortunately, Drupal’s own documentation on features doesn’t focus as much as I’d like on the features entrepreneurs are most likely to be interested in.  So then, here’s my take on what Drupal provides out of the box — and, by extension, what makes Drupal so great for Web development:

User Accounts

Whether you’re building a site with content, community, ecommerce, or marketing at the forefront, someone’s going to need to be able to log in to your site and perform some action.  Editors will add new articles, community members will post comments, customers will track their orders, staff will update company information, and so on.

Building a user registration and account system like this on your own takes time and is prone to security holes.  Drupal provides it all right out of the box, and it’s been thoroughly tested by experts, and any security patches that may be required in the future are free.

User Roles & Permissions

Because modern Web sites often require different classes of users with different permissions — think of site administrators versus community members or customers — Drupal lets you create roles and assign users to them.  Each role (say, “admin”, “editor”, “member”, “customer”, etc.) can have different levels of access to the features on your site.

Editable Pages

Out of the box, you can create a Home page, an About page, a Contact Us page, and any other Web page for your site that you need.  You can give one or more of the roles on your site permission to edit these pages –  for example, the “editor” role.  Anyone with the editor role would then be able to log in to the site, browse to any of the pages, click the “edit” tab,  and update the content on that page.  Maintaining your site is no longer limited to one Webmaster.

Multiple Content Types

Drupal lets you define other content types, beyond “Pages.”  For instance, you might create a “Product” content type that you’ll use to store and display information about individual products that your company sells.  Or you might create a “Press Release” content type.

At their core, Drupal content types are pretty simple: They have a Title field and an optional Body field.  The posting time, author, and resulting URL where the content will appear on your site are also saved with each new content item you create.

But with the addition of a few modules, you can create truly powerful content types.  These modules don’t come with Drupal “out of the box” (at least not yet), but they’re free, well-tested, and take just minutes to install:

• CCK: Stands for “content construction kit.” Lets you add additional fields to your content types, like Price, Phone Number, SKU, etc.
• Filefield and Imagefield: Lets you attach images and other files to content items.  Handy for product images, user contributed photos, and so on.
• Imagecache: Automatically resizes attached images and saves multiple versions, like thumbnails and originals, according to your preferences.
• Views: Lets you set up “lists” of content in multiple, powerful ways. For example, you could set up a product catalog, or a list of new products, or a list of all users, or just new users.

User-Generated Content

By combining a custom content type and user roles, you can set up a site that accepts user-generated content.  For instance, let’s say you want to create a photo sharing site.  You’d start by setting up a “Photo” content type that has Title, Description, and Photo attachment fields.   You’d then adjust your site’s user permissions so that any authenticated (registered) user could create new “Photo” content.  Use the Views module to show new photos and to create a photo archive, and there you go.

Blogs

Drupal extends the concept of the blog and makes it a community activity by giving every registered user on your site his or her own blog. The latest posts across all the user are aggregated and shown in a group blog. You can limit this if you just want an organization-only blog, or leaving blogging off altogether.

Note, though, that if all you want is a tool to help you blog, Drupal is probably overkill.  I recommend  WordPress for simple, one-person blogs.

Comments

You can turn comments on for any content type on your Drupal site.  Want people to comment on your photos? No problem.  Don’t want them to comment on your company’s press releases? No problem.

You can even change comment settings on a per-item basis.  Don’t want people to comment on that particular photo?  No problem.

Draft Mode

Not sure you’re ready to make a certain item of content “live” for the world to see?  Uncheck the “published” box and leave it in draft mode.

Revisions

Drupal can automatically save revisions of any content item on your site.  Think you might want to revert back to a previous version of your About page?  Not happy with changes to your Home page?  Product promotion over and it’s time to return to the standard product listing?  No problem.

RSS Feeds

Drupal automatically generates an RSS feed for its default front page, where the latest content on a site is listed.  If you use Drupal’s core taxonomy module (mentioned below) to organize your content, each taxonomy page will have its own RSS feed, too.  Better yet, if you install and use the Views module,  any list of content on your site can have an RSS feed.

Clean URLs

If your Web server supports URL-rewriting (and most do), Drupal will let you change the URLs of individual content items, from Drupal’s standard-but-cryptic “/node/123″ style to “/about”, “/contact”, “/first-blog-post” or whatever else you’d like.

Search

Drupal comes with a search indexer built in.  Your users can search for any content on your site or any user (if you let them.)

Taxonomy (Including Free Tagging)

If you have a lot of content, you’re going to want to organize it in categories to make it easier to find.  For instance, if you run a travel guides site, you might use a simple taxonomy — perhaps “Countries” — so visitors can find articles related to a particular country.

You can also create hierarchical taxonomies (like, “Continents -> Countries -> Provinces -> Cities”).  And you can create free tagging taxonomies where editors or users classify content according to any keywords they deem fit at the time they create the content (like “USA”, “country”, “North America”, “states”, etc.).

Forums

Drupal combines a “Forum” content type, a forum taxonomy, and its comments system to provide a simple message board system.  To be fair, it’s lacking many of the administrative features that a forums-specific software package like vBulletin provides, but a lot of those features can be added through other Drupal modules.

Caching

To optimize the loading and serving of dynamic Web pages, Drupal offers caching and perfomance tools at multiple levels.  First, you can have Drupal automatically compress your stylesheets and your JavaScript files so that there are fewer files to serve — and consequently, fewer files to load on the browser side.

If your site is content-rich, rather than community-oriented, you can also benefit from page-level caching. Here Drupal builds a page and then saves the HTML code for it in the database.  The HTML is served up on future requests, which is faster than rebuilding the page anew each time.  (For an even faster take on this, check out the Boost module.)

Web-Based Administration

Everything in Drupal is managed through the Web (other than installing new modules and themes.)  This means editors can add and modify content from virtually anywhere.  Likewise, site administrators can make most configuration changes by logging in to the Web site and accessing the administration panel.

Customizable Look and Feel

Though Drupal comes with some “themes” you can use right away, you can customize your site to look any way you want thanks to a flexible, PHP-based templating system.

Security

Because Drupal is an open source project with a huge following, its code is well reviewed and security holes are patched quickly.  In fact, drupal has a security team that carefully reviews reported security vulnerabilities and maintains guidelines for Drupal developers on how to write secure code.  New releases containing security patches are made available on Drupal.org and are free.

Modularity

Perhaps best of all, Drupal “out of the box” was designed to be modular.  The system can be extended and highly customized by adding new modules, literally thousands of which are available for free from Drupal.org.  Want an events calendar?  There’s a module for it.  Want to plot all your site’s users on a Google Map?  There’s a module for it.

This is what people have in mind when they say Drupal is a “platform” for building sites.  Indeed, calling Drupal a “content management system” is a poor explanation of what it can really do.  Sure, out of the box, Drupal is oriented around managing content.  But once you tap into all the modules available for extending Drupal, you realize that Drupal does much more — ecommerce, user-generated content, social networking, and more.

So really, the best way to describe Drupal is to call it a “Website construction kit”, not a content management system or a platform.  And the question shouldn’t be, What does Drupal provide out of the box?  It should be, What does your Web site need?

The system was built on Drupal, which will make future expansion a snap. It uses multiple layers of caching to limit the load on the server and ensure users continue to get the fast page loads they’re used to.  It fits into the existing site architecture, some of which doesn’t use Drupal.  And it was deployed onto the active site with only minutes of total downtime.

Ensuring that old URLs continued to work was a challenge, but not insurmountable. Most of the system was built using contributed Drupal modules.  The majority of the custom code that was written was for the theme.  All in all, this is a great example of Drupal’s content management capabilities on a high traffic site.

(PS: If you need a digital camera, the Digital Camera Resource Page is the first place you should look!)