Case Study: Momentum Magazine Builds Web Version With Drupal

By Dee-Ann LeBlanc (@deele) Jun 23, 2009 Comments

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Wendell Challenger is an "uber bike geek" and a graduate-level science student studying topics related to evolution. He's also one of the volunteer writers and photographers for Momentum Magazine, a free bi-monthly publication for urban cyclists available in twenty cities in the US and Canada.

When it was decided to build Momentum's, um, momentum, by bringing its free content onto the Web, Challenger took on the project. Free and open source seemed a no-brainer between his scientific background and the free, community nature of the magazine. At Open Web Vancouver 2009 (news, site) he shared his experience.

A Little Side Project

How did someone with limited web and no PHP experience end up building a Drupal (news, site) site for a magazine? Challenger says, "Its one of those funny life stories where at first it seems odd that you have 12 grand pianos in your house, but if you go through it step by step it actually makes a lot of sense."

The choice to use open source came from such factors as having a small market share yet wanting a highly specific e-publishing platform with:

Tailored content delivery
Internal bi-directionality
Deep internal linking

Along with factors such as:

Being on a budget, working with volunteer help and limited resources
Wanting their solution to be future proof for long-term survival
Avoiding proprietary lock-in

Drupal ended up a bit of a no-brainer in their case. Momentum's original website was already built on Drupal, and with very little customization. Challenger, initially a WordPress user, had been growing frustrated with WP's limitations: while he found it easier to theme than Drupal and says WordPress has "amazing usability if you are looking to just blog," he had to hack WordPress more to add functionality such as integrated calendars, photos and book-like hierarchical tutorial articles, which made upgrading difficult. Due to these issues, he'd been playing with Drupal on his own.

What sealed the deal was an editorial meeting in December 2006. Someone from Bryght — now Rain City — came to talk to them about what Drupal was capable of. Impressed by:

Drupal's modularity, not to mention the sheer number of modules
The focus on architecture, which he found a breath of fresh air compared to open source projects such as WordPress and Gallery
That everything from core functionality to modules to themes integrated into cascading overrides (hooks) that produce a flexible result that could expand in any future direction they needed
The tons of online resources
The size and openness of Drupal's community

Challenger volunteered to help their webmaster do the build. His initial job was to research what modules to use and issues of best practice.

It seemed a nice volunteer side project for someone working on their PhD. Except, the webmaster quit shortly after, and he didn't want to leave Momentum with an incomplete project. So suddenly he was the sole (volunteer) developer.

Building In Drupal

In particular, he chose to follow the NY Observer model for how they built their own online presence using the same open source Web CMS. This model allows for assigning authorship/ownership to each piece of content, such as pictures and articles, by having edition nodes, story nodes and contributor nodes.

The NY Observer Publishing Model, provided by Momentum Magazine.

Two modules he relied heavily on were CCK, which allows for creating custom fields, and Views, which lets you create MySQL queries from a browser. CCK allowed Challenger to create field-based complex web forms without ever having to touch the database.