Liveblog

This is a new liveblogging module for the Drupal distribution Thunder.

The Certified Thunder Integrator galaniprojects from Berlin, the Austrian publisher Telekurier Online Medien with its news site kurier.at and Burda with its magazine bunte.de, developed this Drupal 8 module for the live coverage of events, with the help of the Vienna based company Drunomics.

Overall Structure

The Liveblog consists of following structure:

• A lead article at the top
• Followed by the liveblog, which consists of
  • individual entries/items,
  • with different content types (Text/Image/Twitter...),
  • which updates automatically

Installation instructions

Preparation

Inline Entity Form

It is recommended to apply a patch for the Inline Entity Form module:

• Issue: Entities are not updated during buildEntity() phase
• Patch https://www.drupal.org/files/issues/ief_building.patch

Pusher

The default method to push new posts to your users is via the Pusher service. You have to register an account for it here: https://pusher.com/. Please note down the App ID, Key and Secret.
You also need the pusher library. See here for instructions: https://github.com/pusher/pusher-http-php

If you are not using a composer workflow, you can download the library here: https://github.com/pusher/pusher-http-php/releases. Use pusher version 3.0.0 or greater.
Extract it into your libraries folder (libraries or sites/<domain>/libraries) and rename it to pusher. The library should contain the path src/Pusher.php

Installation

1. Activate the Liveblog and the Liveblog Pusher modules.
   • optionally activate Liveblog Paragraphs for a preconfigured paragraphs integration
2. Navigate to http://example.com/admin/config/content/liveblog
   • configure the pusher service with the information given by Pusher

Usage

General

1. Create a new Liveblog content type.
   1. Select which default highlights the editors can choose
   2. Set how much posts should be loaded on initial load and on lazyloading.
   3. Click on save.
2. When you are logged in and view the liveblog, you will see a form and below that, the stream.
3. Fill out the form
   1. Preview it
   2. Save it
4. The post appears in the stream immediately

You can view all posts on your site by navigating to http://example.com/admin/content/liveblog_posts

Configuration

You can manage the fields of the liveblog posts at http://example.com/admin/structure/liveblog_post_settings/fields (in menu: Structure -> Liveblog posts)

Highlights

Highlights add a class to the post, according to the selected one, e.g. when you select Breaking News, the class liveblog-post--highlight-breaking-news will be added to the post in the DOM.
They can then be styled via css in your theme.

You can add your own highlights to the Highlight taxonomy.

Development

Running tests

Make sure to use your DB connection details for the SIMPLETEST_DB and the URL to your local Drupal installation for SIMPLETEST_BASE_URL.

cd /path/to/drupal-8/core
export SIMPLETEST_DB=mysql://drupal-8:password@localhost/drupal-8
export SIMPLETEST_BASE_URL=http://drupal-8.localhost
../vendor/bin/phpunit ../modules/liveblog

See https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/phpunit/running-phpunit-tests (Section: Run kernel test and browser tests) for more details.