As you may have read or seen already, the Korea IT Times has a new web site at www.koreaittimes.com. It was all created using free, open source software that is readily available for anyone to use. The software is called Drupal. If you or someone you know would also be interested in starting up a magazine or newspaper-based web site, just follow this guide to get yourself started.
But first, some history and background to make understanding everything a little easier. Drupal is an open source Content Management System (CMS) written using the dynamic scripting language PHP. Its web site can be found at drupal.org and the software to set up a basic Drupal site can be downloaded from there. Drupal itself is designed to be, as it says on its web site, "a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website." That is a rather large understatement, because it has developed to become one of the most accessible, modifiable, and powerful CMS systems around. This is due in part to the large number of modules developed by third parties which add thousands of different, customized functions to Drupal for almost any task under the sun.
Starting with the basics, a CMS system is basically a set of tools that allows someone to create more content on their web sites faster than they would be able to without it. There are other popular CMS systems including Joomla, Mambo, and Wordpress. Each of them have their pros and cons, but Drupal has some history of being specifically used as a magazine or newspaper CMS. The first major news site that caught my eye using Drupal was the Onion, at www.theonion. com, a parody news web site, but with a very professional presentation. Other important magazine web site that used Drupal included the Popular Science web site, NowPublic.com, and the New York Observer, a prominent New York City newspaper.
The New York Observer is important because they wrote up a case study detailing their experiences in adapting Drupal to their needs which was inspirational to others in the Drupal community, including myself. One such person decided to follow their implementation strategy and release it as an open source Profile of Drupal called ProsePoint. That is a collection of customized settings, themes, and modules that you can download along with Drupal for a specific task. This task would be, of course, making a magazine web site.
My work on koreaittimes.com was greatly simplified by this profile compilation, and is a great illustration of the extensible power of Drupal. The profile included everything I was thinking of doing, from the theme I was thinking of using to the customized modules I was planning to implement. It is unfortunate that the New York Observer did not release their customizations as a Profile themselves, but their descriptions were enough for another person to follow in their footsteps.
Getting Down to Details
The second step is to choose where you will host your web site. If you're going to launch a magazine online you need to be able to reach a truly global audience, which means that you need excellent web hosting. Setting up a few servers in your company's basement might work for a company intranet, but if you'd like to have quick service from any part of the globe you need to go with a popular and global brand in web hosting. The Korea IT Times chose Mediatemple.net, a web host with a strong reputation for speed and technical support. Also, their client list includes the television networks abc and NBC, popular online sites TechCrunch and Mashable, and global brands Sony and Volkswagen, among others. Most importantly, they offer Drupal's requirements for installation on all of their hosting plans. Drupal requires a web host that is running an Apache web server - although Microsoft IIS will work if configured correctly - PHP 5.2 or higher, and MySQL 4.1 or 5.0 - although PostgreSQL 7.4 will also work. Also, Drupal has a reputation for making a lot of database queries so a web host that has their MySQL database server on the same machine or very closely connected with their Apache web server is best. Mediatemple.net met all these requirements easily.
The third step is to install what you've downloaded. Drupal comes with excellent documentation, so by simply unzipping the ProsePoint file and following the instructions you can get your site up and running in about an hour, which includes starting over once or twice due to a misunderstanding of the instructions. ProsePoint is a specific configuration of Drupal, so the two are basically interchangeable terms.
The next step is to modify the ProsePoint installation to meet your specific needs. Originally I anticipated spending a lot of time downloading and modifying some of Drupal's 3,000 odd modules to follow roughly in the footsteps of the New York Observer, which might have taken several months. However, ProsePoint had already done all that for me, so most of my time was spent in tweaking ProsePoint to suit the Korea IT Times needs, and adding custom modules for additional functions. Customizing ProsePoint, adding and removing features, and changing settings can be done after logging in as the administrator, via a convenient drop-down menu located at the top of the web site. Its best to explore everything and click on every option at least twice. Helpful explanations and easy-to-understand options make it an enjoyable process.
ProsePoint is designed around the concept of editions and channels. Editions are published collections of content, whether they are daily, weekly, or monthly as in our case. Channels are categories of content, stories grouped together in a common theme. You can see the channels as menu items at www.koreaittimes.com, and the only current edition is being displayed right now on the front page. Viewing content on the site is done with these two different methods. Or, if you need to, you can just use one or the other. Each channel can be viewed in chronological order, or in real-time.
An optional final step would be to download additional modules to further customize your ProsePoint installation. After becoming familiar with the capabilities and limitations of ProsePoint, there were some additional modules that I downloaded to use that were not included in the ProsePoint install profile. This also illustrates the extensible flexibility of Drupal, because there are over 3,000 modules available for download for any task you would need to perform. The first additional module was called Tagadelic, which I downloaded with its companion module Community_Tags. These two allowed me to include tagging functions with each story, which will hopefully catch on for our readers in the future. A second module which I downloaded was called simply Captcha, which is the image reading and confirmation step that users must perform to create a new web site account or post an anonymous comment. This is to block automated bots from registering and posting comments. There were a few other modules I downloaded that made backing up the system easier, and made breadcrumbs look better. And, in the future, there is always the option to download additional modules if the magazine needs their functionality.
All in all, it is amazingly simple and easy to get a standard ProsePoint installation up and running. The hard part, at least for me, is porting all of the old information from the previous Korea IT Times web site to the new site, which may take a month or more.
