Forums / General / Several newspapers with single backbone and database?

Several newspapers with single backbone and database?

Author Message

John Henrik Guttorm

Saturday 10 January 2009 4:35:00 am

Hello guys, I'm completely new to theese forums. *wave*

I'm in the planning of making three "separate" newspapers on the web. All three are local newspapers from the same region, with the same owners.

What I'm looking for is a way to have the same article/image/video/content database for all three of them, but separate them with ENUM or something. Filtering in the listing of content, sort of.

I want to be able to share content across the papers, but also view articles only by "this newspaper", if you catch my drift.
Separating users(journalists, editors) from the different newspapers would be great as well.

Does EZ support this , or do you have any other tips for me? I'm not new to SQL or PHP.

André R.

Saturday 10 January 2009 7:54:00 am

eZ Publish lets you do this very easily, you simply have three separate content tree's and use node placement to place an article / video / content in all three sites if you want or just one site. You can also easily setup different roles to give permissions to one or more content trees to user goups or users.

Some notes though:
* When I say easy, I say that relative to my own knowledge of eZ Publish. For a newbie, starting off by creating a custom multi site setup from scratch is a pretty steep learning curve. I'm not saying it's impossible, it was the first thing I had to do with ezp myself. I'm just saying you'll make life easier for your self by taking a course, preferably a custom tailored one so the teacher / consultant you hire concentrate on the subject of your interest, or alternatively hire / rent a experienced to work thorougher with you / your team during the start of the implementation phase.
* node placements are pr object, not pr tree, meaning by default comments for an article in site a will not show up in site b, but that's probably how you want it anyway. A better example are image galleries, if you add several placements to a image gallery, then the images placed as childes of it will still only exist on the original placement. One way to 'fix' this is to modify front end gallery templates to fetch images from the default (main node) placement of the gallery.
* By default eZ Publish uses one simple media library, so if you want separate media libraries for your sites, then you should get that right as early as possible, as it is a 'bitch' to clean up a messy media library after some time.. read RelationAssignmentSettings in settings/content.ini to see what kind of possibilities you have.
* By default ezwebin and ezflow use a template_look object to save settings for the site (theme, labels, logo, footer text...), this does not work on multi site setup. So you should instead have custom versions of the pagelayout.tpl file for the three sites to manually set included css and so on for a multi site setup.
* Performance, for news site you should have a reverse proxy in front. And you should also consider multiple servers for eZ Publish as well (ez publish cluster or san setup) depending on your traffic numbers for the three sites.

eZ Online Editor 5: http://projects.ez.no/ezoe || eZJSCore (Ajax): http://projects.ez.no/ezjscore || eZ Publish EE http://ez.no/eZPublish/eZ-Publish-Enterprise-Subscription
@: http://twitter.com/andrerom

John Henrik Guttorm

Sunday 11 January 2009 11:00:16 am

Thanks for a swift and really informative answer! Really appreciated :)

Relieving to hear that EZ has some good built in functions for this!
Allthough, i get a little stressed out when you mention I should hire an expert/take a class before I get into this project. It's a relatively low-budget project, with one developer in mind for both layout and programming.

The time-frame given is 1(planning)+3(programming, code)+2(layout and implementation) weeks. As i mentioned, it's for some local newspapers, so it wont be generating much traffic. load balancing shouldnt be nescesary

Should I consider any other open source solution, which is easier/faster to hack into a functionable newssite? I have only heard a bit about Drupal, but in my mind EZ offers a wider spectre of possibilities, which has always been important for me.

Which modules/versions should I be looking at to try out first? I have 2 days off now, and i'm thinking I should get something up running to get familiar with theese new CMSes..

Cheers.

André R.

Sunday 11 January 2009 2:04:49 pm

The consultant / course part was a suggestion to make life easier in the beginning.
But with the proper hints on how to get started it should get you started.

The template language and the cache system is probably the right place to start.

1. eZ Publish executes the module before it executes the pagelayout, the result of the module is defined in the pagelayout as $module_result.
2. setup a a clean eZ Publish site with the ezflow package, remember to read the requirements:
http://ez.no/doc/ez_publish/technical_manual/4_0/installation/normal_installation/requirements_for_doing_a_normal_installation
3: walk true the old tutorial:
http://ez.no/ezpublish/documentation/building_an_ez_publish_site/prerequisits
4: look at the new documentation to see how the new (3.6) template code looks like (don't worry, it's way more easy and closer to what your used to in php):
http://ez.no/doc/ez_publish/technical_manual/4_0/reference/template_control_structures
5. disable [ContentSettings]ViewCache and [TemplateSettings]TemplateCache and enable [TemplateSettings]DevelopmentMode, [TemplateSettings]ShowUsedTemplates and [DebugSettings]DebugOutput in site.ini (use override file in settings/override), but you'll need to re enable the cache settings as soon as you start getting the hang of it to avoid doing cache mistakes.
6. clear all cache (click setup in the admin siteaccess)
7. Get started by overriding (placement overriding: place the file in same position in your own extension, and make sure the extension design you use or the extension has higher priority the the file your overriding) the pagelayout.tpl and folder.tpl, you can see where they're placed by navigating to a page that uses a folder, for instance the news page, and look at the debug output.

eZ Online Editor 5: http://projects.ez.no/ezoe || eZJSCore (Ajax): http://projects.ez.no/ezjscore || eZ Publish EE http://ez.no/eZPublish/eZ-Publish-Enterprise-Subscription
@: http://twitter.com/andrerom