CMS: A journey into the unknown

http://aprilcorbin.jourcms.brauerranch.com

I decided to tackle Drupal with the intention of furthering the news website we’re trying to build.

First, I enabled the ‘news aggregator’ module and added three RSS feeds, one from http://www.unlvrebelyell.com/, one from http://www.rebcast.com/ and the other from my WordPress-site http://www.aprilcore.com.  For the Yell’s RSS feed, I then enabled a block and placed it in my right sidebar.  I tried to do the same for RebCast but the feed hasn’t picked up anything.  For the aprilcore feed, I customized all posts to be categorized as “Other RSS.”  Then, I enabled a block for the “Other RSS” category.  I figured that way, we could lump less important RSS feeds together… while still giving awesome RSS feeds (like the beloved school newspaper) their own special block.

Second, I created an Utterz account.  I know we want to use this website for ongoing coverage of events, like the JMS coverage of the Democratic national debate.  Utterz made it really simple.  It told me which modules to enable (API blog) and then had me type in the link to my Drupal site and my log-in.  That set up an automatic filter from my Utterz account to the Drupal blog.  I tested it out with a (really stupid) voice post from my phone.  It worked.

Third, I created a Twitter account.  They have a “share your feed’ section which created flash for you.  I followed those two-click instructions, then copied and pasted the code into a custom block on my Druapl site.  Then, it magically appeared on the right sidebar of the mainsite.

I talked to Rob a little tonight about how information should be sorted on the website.  We didn’t really come to a great conclusion.  I think maybe if we defined the site a little bit more, that would be steer me in the right direction of how to set up the use of categories and tags.  My first impulse was to make sections for the type of content (written/audio/photo/video) but then I realized that might get complicated for posts containing more than one type of media.  Rob suggested doing it by topic instead, which makes sense, except that I’m not sure what the topics would be.