Last June, my company, NowSpots, won Knight News Challenge funding to build better local online advertising products for newspapers, alt-weeklies, and community newspapers. We’ve been building our product and working in closed beta with pilot publishers these last months. We’re seeing great results and are about to open up to new publishers. If your publication is interested in getting in early on a new flavor of online ad, one that local businesses, colleges, and political campaigns actually want to buy, drop us a line. In the meantime, we want to use these pieces on Idea Lab to focus some attention on topics of interest and use to community news publishers. You can follow NowSpots on Twitter here or follow me here.
A new Drupal module and iPhone app makes it easier for community news publishers to juggle the demands of managing and building an audience online and getting outside to cover the community.
Drupad (currenty $4.99 in the iPhone app store), is an iPhone app that lets anyone running a Drupal 6 site read and moderate the latest comments, content, and user sign-ups from their iPhone. The app, from French developer breek.fr, requires that you install a companion Drupal module on your site. I found it while browsing new contributed modules on Drupal.org, installed it a few days before Thanksgiving, and now use it multiple times a day to check up on the latest happenings on WindyCitizen.com, a Chicago-centric social news site I publish.
While Drupad is in not aimed specifically at community news publishers, I believe any publisher running a Drupal 6 site who installs it will immediately find it indispensable. If you’re using Drupal and own an iPhone, get Drupad. It does three things incredibly well for community news publishers.
Two Places At Once
- Drupad solves the “two places at once” problem
As a community news publisher or local blogger, one of your biggest problems is what I call the “two places at once” problem. Someone needs to be “out there” attending events, snapping photos, interviewing people, and generally reporting on stuff. Meanwhile, someone needs to moderate comments on your site, post stuff on Twitter and Facebook, block spammers, and update stories on the front page. If you’ve read any of the interviews with AOL‘s Patch editors where they talk about their daily job, you get the picture. You’ve got be outside and inside at once. It’s tricky. The first iteration of Windy Citizen was a more traditional news magazine site that required me to be out reporting and inside running the site. It was a nightmare.
With Drupad, local bloggers running Drupal sites can check up on how things are going while on the bus, waiting at a meeting, or in between interviews from their phone. It puts a simple administration interface in your hand so you can stay on top of what’s new on your site and moderate comments on the fly. Since I set up Drupad last week, I no longer need to worry about staying near a computer at all times to check up on Windy Citizen. With Drupad, local bloggers will be able to spend more time out in the field and less time strapped to their desk keeping watch over their sites. This is a big win.
Block Spammers
2. Drupad makes it easier to block spammers
If your community news site or local blog has decent traffic or any semblance of a commenting community, you probably have issues with spammers posting nasty comments and content on your site. With Drupal’s default admin UI, you usually wind up:
- Spotting the comment
- Clicking the “delete” link on the comment.
- Clicking “yes” on the next page to confirm you want to delete it.
- Going to your user list page in the admin interface.
- Clicking the checkbox next to the user who posted the offensive comment.
- Indicating that you want to block that user.
- Clicking the button to put the change in motion.
That’s seven clicks to delete a spam comment and block a user. That sucks. If the user has posted comments all over your site or you have multiple spammers to deal with, it can be a real pain in the butt.
One of the things I’ve come to enjoy about having Drupad on my iPhone is that the iOS-ified UI it uses makes blocking users a much smoother experience. With Drupad, I can go to my user list, click on their profile, and just click a button. There’s no waiting around for pages to load. It’s a more pleasant experience all around. Anything that makes it easier or even more fun to fight spammers on your site is a win in my book.
It Works!
3. Drupad won’t crash your site and actually works
The final reason every local blogger and community news publisher should install Drupad is because the thing actually works. Those of you who run Drupal sites are nodding your head at this point. Those of you who never have are scratching yours. Those of you who develop and release Drupal modules (thank you!) are clenching your fists and gritting your teeth. The truth about Drupal is that it’s an incredibly powerful CMS that can be modified through community-created modules (similar to WordPress’ plug-ins) to function as a PHP framework. So you can do a lot of things with a Drupal site. That’s one of Drupal’s biggest strengths.
On the other hand, the community modules themselves can be a real grab bag. Some are great and mainstays that every Drupal site needs to survive (see Steve Yelvington’s recent piece to read about some of them); but many of them are very much works in progress that promise a lot but will break your site and cost you a great deal of time unless you’re a trained developer or have one on your team to supervise. Drupal’s great, but it’s for developers, not lay people.
I’m happy to say that Drupad is not one of these modules. I downloaded it and installed it on Windy Citizen. It did not crash our site or give us Drupal’s dreaded “white screen of death.” Then I bought the iPhone app and filled in the admin credentials for Windy Citizen. The app was able to connect immediately to our site and start showing me comments, content, and the latest users. Drupad just works, and that’s a huge selling point for any Drupal module.
You can download the Drupad module for Drupal 6 here and buy it from the iTunes app store here.
Let me know what you think in the comments below. I’d love to hear what other people make of it. It’s clear from the roadmap posted on the developer’s site that he wants to roll out more features. Even in its current simple state, I think it’s worth the $5 for any and every local blogger who’s ventured out into Drupal land.
