Check out The Four Types of Email Programmers Receive and see if you’ve ever sent a message like that. (Don’t worry, we all have at one point — but now you know better, right? ;)

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

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!)

More in-depth training that goes under the hood of an actual application would be great.  And if anyone attends an AWS bootcamp in the meantime, I’d love to hear how it went.

Nearly three hours into the class, we’re still on introductory slides and there’s confusion among attendees about how Elastic Block Storage works.  Also, the network here has slowed to a crawl so even the presenter’s online examples are being impacted.  Usually, at conferences, I forgive the inevitable network issues that arise when a roomful of developers go online at once.  But when you charge for a class focused on Web-based technologies, I think it’s a requirement to be prepared to handle the traffic.

Still, I’m hoping things pick up after lunch and that we actually into the examples.  The goal is to get under the hood of a video sharing application that runs off EC2, S3, and other Amazon Web services. Fingers crossed.

Update: We got a little further after lunch, and finally got a little more hands-on with some of the tools available for administering EC2 and S3.  So we practiced launching Linux and Windows server instances, transferred files to S3 buckets, and mounted EBS volumes.

But we were clearly short on time and had to skip most of the code examples.  In particular, we never got to the video sharing application — which was the entire reason I signed up.  While administering AWS is a necessary step in developing and deploying applications on Amazon’s infrastructure, it’s hard to justify spending $175 and the related costs of an entire day away from the office only to come back with no real insight into the architecture of an AWS application.  The session was touted as a “Developer Bootcamp” after all.

What could the presenters have done differently?  Four things:

1. Skip the 45-minute-long “team building” exercise at the beginning of the day.  For a one-day session during which there is no other group work, there’s no need to “team build.”  If you want to encourage people to meet others, a 10-minute round-robin of people introducing themselves and saying why they are attending would suffice.
2. Don’t switch the software requirements once attendees arrive (as our presenter did.)  We wasted valuable time as everyone tried to download the new code samples and consequently brought the entire network to a halt.  People should arrive at the session with all the necessary software installed and ready to go.   If people need help with configuring the software, maybe ask them to arrive early during the breakfast portion of the day?
3. Ensure that the network can handle the traffic.
4. Don’t spend so much session time answering tangential questions.  The goal of the day is to provide a developer-level look at how one can build an application on AWS.  Attendees who have specific questions about AWS or need clarification on things that aren’t core to the session should be encouraged to re-ask their questions at lunch.

Hopefully the presenters will improve in subsequent bootcamps.  Based on the peformance at this one, however, I can’t recommend it to other developers.

Update 2: Amazon has refunded the $175 I paid to attend the class.

I guess they figured the system wouldn’t be abused because only the staff members would know the phone number.  What they didn’t plan for, however, was telemarketers accidentally stumbling across the system as their auto-dialers try every possible phone number.

So imagine my surprise — and everyone else’s there at the pool the other day — when in the middle of the usual lap swim time a pitch for carpet cleaning services suddenly blasted out from the speakers.

Moral of the story? Just beause you think you’ve hidden some technical feature where no one will find it doesn’t mean they won’t.  If it’s important to you to hide something, use real security measures like a password.