Building a Publishing Website with Drupal

Suppose you have a great new idea for an online publication and want to build out the solution in Drupal. The good news is the software has the proven ability to scale to large site including the New York Observer, The Economist, Seattle Times and the Onion, among others.

With a wide variety of high quality publications using the software an active community has emerged in support of the project. When it comes to planning out your content management system (CMS), Drupal is an ideal, feature-rich choice for your publishing software. With the release of version 7.0, Drupal has a flexible structure that is powerful enough to support everything from startup projects to mature online publishing platforms.

Modern Publishing for Drupal Developers

As an open source platform, you can eliminate any major licensing fees you would encounter with more professional platforms such as Ellington. Further when it comes to customizing your site you have full access to the source code so you can easily migrate, update and customize your site as needed. With an accessible CMS backend and flexible technical structure you can easily adapt your Drupal site to meet your site needs. Modern newspaper design is often built on a grid and Drupal has custom fields which allow you to structure your content accordingly.

In particular, you can adjust the layout of your content to incorporate articles, excerpts, photos, credits, issue numbers and a variety of searchable formats. With tagging, your readers can easily find the content they are looking for in either current or archived issues. For sites with time sensitive publishing, you can customize the “life” of an article so it becomes archived automatically based upon the server response (local) time. Syndicating your articles and interacting with readers through RSS is also fully integrated. With a structure that allows multiple authors and editors you can easily push your new content onto the web in less time.

Another important aspect of publishing are event-based items, which you can use for promotions, a community calendar or citations within your article. Drupal allows for custom fields including maps, photos, sections and tags within calendar events so you can provide real time connections for your readers to on site content.

One major overlooked feature of Drupal is the ability to create custom groups to limit access to certain sections of the site. This is an ideal feature for those looking to integrate a complete set of publishing options and payment methods for premium subscribers. Additionally, widgets can allow you to publish a variety of content in the sidebar including sponsored posts, advertisements and promotional videos. As a result, monetizing your site can be accomplished easier than ever.

With the customizable groups feature you can easily segment off certain content pieces (except) for excerpts from your readers. Starting with an end vision for your site, you can customize the layout, content and structure of the site. With the combination of impressive custom publishing options and layouts, as well as social integration and e-Commerce applications, you can build out a complete publication site in Drupal.