Posted by gusaus on January 6, 2016 at 9:37pm
For those not following the project on d.o., there's an effort to port Station to Drupal 8 and help sustain it via crowdfunding and building client sites in the open. Contributors, supporters, and those who may benefit from using such a solution...please don't hesitate to get involved!
Comments
Thanks for the heads up, that
Thanks for the heads up, that sounds interesting!
I work for a large group of radio stations in Australia. Several years ago I looked at the station module, but it didn't fit the specific needs of the radio stations I was building for. I ended up building my own scheduling solution based on schedule nodes and entity references to shows and presenters.
Now the company I work for has acquired several more radio stations and is looking to reposition some of them, which will involve new web site builds.
I'd be interested in contributing to a D8 version of station, that would hopefully be use-case generic enough to support what our company has in mind.
I'll jump into the issue queue with some more detailed info when I get time.
Overlap/compliment with other groups and projects?
It's hard to tell which groups and projects are still active, but there probably is some overlap/compliment to some of these -
Seems like there would be a good deal of overlap and potential for combining of resources?
Gus Austin
Audience Engine
I recently came across Audience Engine, an open-source, customizable suite of fundraising tools for public radio. It looks like there was going to be some tight integration with Drupal at some point.
Then it looks like they changed course
That being said, all the code is open source and I 'think' there will be ways to incorporate some or all of their components.
RADIO
Audio Archive Management
Live Interactive Playlists
SoundExchange reporting
Traffic Control: Program & spot scheduling
Support for Podcasts, Video & Images
Per-Program Crowdfunding
FUNDRAISING
Crowdfunding
One-Click Donations
Gift Inventory
Mini-Goals–>Overall Goal
On and Off-Site Donation Widgets
Peer to Peer Campaigns
DONOR MANAGEMENT
Civi-CRM
Email Management
Behavior Tracking and Analytics
Major Gift Research
Social Media Management
GIFT FULFILLMENT
Packing Slips
Postal Codes
Gift Inventory
IRS Tax Letters
Customer Service
ENGAGEMENT
User registration, profiles, favorites, analytics
Cross-organizational search (opt-in audience sharing)
Chat, annotations, commenting
Crowd enrichment of content
Metrics on your community: Learn what they like and tailor your fundraising accordingly
Not sure how much of this functionality is already built into the Station modules, but this could be a great source to add on the rest.
Any thoughts or experiences with this platform?
Gus Austin
Damn, too bad about the
Damn, too bad about the drupal vs. wordpress thing. The only thing their website says about either is this:
"WordPress developers Joey Dehnert and Andrew Nealon at InsertCulture are building Audience Engine’s full web platform, which is the perfect option for lean organizations operating with limited IT staff."
But I really like the idea of the fundraising features. I will research this further, I believe my station will benefit greatly from Audience Engine. Even if we have to install wordpress and run it a subdomain or something. We're in the middle of a pledge drive this week and it's not going well already. Maybe it's time we update our fundraising technology.
I work at Kansas Public Radio and we chose Drupal because of the NPR modules available to it. Most other NPR affiliate stations just use NPR's own custom installation of Drupal called NPR Core Publisher. I presume it's a multisite drupal install with modules and themes and customizations for radio stations. But the best parts about it - importing and exporting of nodes to and from the NPR ecosystem (for example, we can import NPR news nodes and export our own news nodes, with mp3 link, to the NPR One app) - are available as modules in Drupal. By using our own Drupal install, we didn't have to worry about NPR having their hands on our data, especially our listener data, the thinking being that they could nab all our listeners now that they don't need our physical broadcasting tower in this age of internet radio. This way we're a little more independent of NPR. Maybe Audience Engage could be another digital tool we can use to keep our independence. Hrmmm...
NPR provides another service to NPR affiliate stations that pay for their digital services. It's called NPR Composer and it overlaps with Audience Engine, especially within the "Radio" features. Namely, Live Interactive Playlists and SoundExchange reporting. That's pretty much all that Composer does actually.
Thanks!
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Kansas Public Radio - http://www.kansaspublicradio.org
Would be great to have you invovled
Hey Dan!
Thanks for chiming in! I posted awhile ago (I know posts are scattered about) that I got a live demo from the WFMU/Audience Engine folks and they were 'very' interested in Drupal integration. There were actually a couple other folks from stations on the call who were interested in incorporating Audience Engine into their Drupal based sites.
Last time we connected they were planning to start building modules for Drupal for their single sign-on and crowdfunding pieces this month. I've since followed up to see if that was still the plan and if/how they needed some help on the Drupal side. Since your station could benefit from using their tools, it would be great to have you involved in further discussions and collaboration.
There are many platforms/modules scattered about the public media or community media space... would be good to have a high level look for overlap and see if resources could be shared and possibly provide a better entry point for stations looking for a particular solution.
Probably should circle back to the Station Module Requirements wiki to figure out next steps?
Gus Austin
Still looking for a product owner.
Per our discussion on d.o., we're still looking for a "product owner" to help decide the functionality and scope of the project. I'm also curious how many people/orgs have used the station module and what the range of budgets they were working with. Assuming many of the budgets for many orgs are low, would it be more cost effective to provide the entire setup as a distribution?
Gus Austin
May be time for a rewrite
Hi!
I used Station for a radio station website a few year ago. I found in a number of areas that it was inflexible. I had to rewrite stuff to get it to work the way the radio station did.
I think that a distribution would be a good idea, but that for station to be great it should be more of a framework like commerce or red hen. It does not try to do everything but makes it possible to do everything and easily extend or enhance. The distro is where you put it all together and do configuration so that it just works, like commerce kickstart.
God Bless!
Frederick
That makes sense
It makes sense to have radio a standalone set of modules and then possibly provide a way to install/enable features upon setup. Not sure exactly what the D8 best practice would be to accomplish that.
Gus Austin
Requirements wiki uncovered
I just came across the Station Module Requirements wiki originally set up for the D7 port. Would make sense to move any relevant discussions and feature ideas there - https://groups.drupal.org/node/220739
Gus Austin
*raises hand to help contribute*
I'm repeating here what I said in the issue queue for Station:
I will be glad to sign up as a contributor and even as the product owner for D7 and D8 versions of Station.
I'm the web developer at Kansas Public Radio and we will need Station for when we upgrade to D8. So, you'll have a skilled programmer who can dedicate a dozen hours a week or so to this project, and has a vested interest in it's success.
I will be attending DrupalCon next month and hope to learn a lot about D8 development. If anybody else interested in Station is attending as well, PLEASE contact me so we can meet up and work on this, possibly participate in a Sprint for this module.
Cheers!
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Kansas Public Radio - http://www.kansaspublicradio.org
Welcome!
It's been awhile since I touched base with Tim regarding the D8 port, but he'll most likely be at Drupalcon. Robbt is also interested in putting more time into these projects when he gets a break from school at the end of this month.
If it makes sense to start with a stable release for D7 (and possibly some starter setups), then maybe we should update the requirements wiki and focus the conversation there? https://groups.drupal.org/node/220739#comment-1142877
Ha - now I'm repeating myself again.
Thanks Dan!
Gus Austin