Co-operative News (http://thenews.coop) is a 140-year-old publication that is still going strong and is perhaps becoming even more relevant these days. They had a website that had been running quite well, but had reached the limit of what it allowed them to do technically. They came to us (myself and Marc De'ath at The Creative Coop) having already researched open source publishing solutions, and having decided that they wanted to use OpenPublish (www.openpublishapp.com), a distribution of Drupal aimed at news publishers and tailored to their requirements.
OpenPublish is a sophisticated and powerful Drupal distribution with a lot of "out of the box" functionality that was surprising to me. Their default theme is advanced and very well designed, so it was a pleasure to work with when creating our own subtheme for the client's design.
In many areas however, we had to push the boundaries in terms of what OpenPublish could do - particularly in the areas of translation and locale. The client wanted content published or syndicated on the site in any of 4 pre-configured languages, with users able to switch between languages easily. Not only that, but any content that was not translated (or had been published in a different language to the 4 base languages) needed to be translated automatically using Google Translate. The aim was to have content from all over the world, in any language, displayed in the language of the user's choice! The solution to this challenge was a combination of Drupal's i18n (internationalization) module, and some creative usage of Google's amazing free translation service.
In addition to this, the website allows you to customise your "edition" - selecting the countries or continents for which you want to read news, using a convenient drop-down. This works for anonymous or logged-in users, and filters the content displayed on all of the main article listings.
Other features and challenges included use of OpenCalais automatic content tagging (with some tweaks), display of the print edition of the newspaper to registered subscribers (using Issuu) and the migration of all of the newspapers old content and subscribers. We collaborated with Nicolas Borda (www.ipwa.net) to deliver the ecommerce and advertising side of the site, as well as general assistance with the theming - Nic helped us hit a very tight deadline!
