Drupal distributions: Open Publish

Open Publish is a Drupal distribution oriented to online media publications: large and small newspapers, magazines, radio online, multimedia sites, publication of papers, etc.

Open Publish is based on Drupal and Drupal EM offering consulting, implementation and support services which can be used by companies.

Open Publish aims to add value to Drupal as a publishing platform, integrating Semantic Web technologies and incorporating methodologies from other publishing engines.

Open Publish is expandable and can be integrated with other tools for searching in Drupal such as ApacheSolr and Pressflow which can improve performance, cache tools and content search.

What can you do with Open Publish?

In a news site made with Open Publish, each note is a node, and they are assembled using "views", getting news listings by category and notes that appear on the home page. Additional modules will handle advertising, blogs, commentators, etc.

Open Publish allows us to accelerate the time to prepare a complete news site. Its use is intuitive and the publisher quickly finds how to enter and edit text, images and multimedia content.

Open Publish comes with a simple design and the a change of logo would suffice to change the appearance of the site. Designers can create more sophisticated sites without difficulty, following the best practices recommended by the platform.

• Articles: can be classified in several ways. Administrators can mark certain articles as "outstanding" to appear on the top of the charts.
• Blogs: with all the usual features of a blog, especially for columnists.
• Multimedia: Open Publish supports multiple media types: audio, video and images, whether hosted on the server itself or embedded.
• Events: contain additional information such as event name, start and end date and description.
• Resources: Resources are links, files, documents and other items of interest to readers. May be free or restricted content by payment.
• Newsfeeds: These are groups of information concerning the same subject, such as an election or a war. They can include articles, files, documents, videos, audio and picture galleries and can be displayed these together in a section or page.

Open Publish allows the direct inclusion of content available only by subscription. The ads can be contextual, relating to the item being displayed.

The notes can be shared on social networks like Facebook or Twitter or e-mail. RSS feeds are also enabled and readers can subscribe to content.

The readers’ comments are enabled by default. May or may not moderate.

The site is already search engine optimized and in recent versions has made great efforts to integrate the product with the semantic web, using modules such as:

• Google Maps, which uses the service of "Geo-tagging". Tags related to geographic locations can be mapped on a Google Map (fully configurable) and displayed along with the content.
• Apture, where readers can explore other content without leaving the site (opens a window with related content).
• More Like This, which allows the editor to suggest related content to readers with a publication. This suggestion can be done automatically with Calais.

Examples

Some prominent sites that have been implemented using Open Publish:
The Nation
Harvest Public Media
NRN