Samizdatonline is an Italian news site which aggregates content from its partner sites. Being an Italian news aggregator the site was to be in Italian. The client also wanted to categorize the content and allow site users to rate the content.
Apart from the framework to enter, manage and categorize content, we chose Drupal for this project because of multilingual feature provided by the i18n module. It provides the framework to create a multilingual site or a site in another language.
We used the simplefeed module to aggregate news from the partner sites. Unlike the aggregator module the simplefeed module save the aggregated feeds as nodes. This was ideal for this project since we wanted to categorize and allow users to rate the content. Once we have the feeds as nodes on the site we can do a whole lot of things with the node. We used the fivestar module to allow the users to rate the news items. The Quickstats module was used for the 'Most read' feature. Apart from aggregating news from the partner site, we created a role for all the editors of the partner sites. They can also enter news directly on the site. We used the Modr8 module to moderate content generated by them. We implemented the various category blocks with the 'Most Read' and 'Most Popular' posts for the respective category via a custom module. The online petitions were also implemented using a custom module. A custom theme was created to match the designs.