I was asked if I knew any ways of converting website content into a readable magazine on an almost daily basis – It’s fair to say that I didn’t but after a few more questions I was able to get to the bottom of what it was that they were looking to construct – which was a new website that they could take the feeds from and make a proper looking downloadable PDF magazine from. But not knowing how didn’t stop me from hunting down some useful links and products.
You may laugh at this if you have an iPad and say yeah but blah and blah creates that really easily – yeah but they weren’t after that and shockingly most people don’t own an iPad.
So for new websites to create PDF Magazines I went through a list of content management systems and the plugins or extensions they might use to create such a thing.
WordPress
This magazine plugin for wordpress would need some setting up by a pro – which i am not.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/magazine/
The example I created is below which I had to create outside of the plugin as I couldn’t get it to work for me.
Joomla
A fantastic content management system is Joomla. Usability wise this CMS is very easy for the users to get their head around.
Although this doesn’t do what we wanted which was to create a PDFable magazine i.e. take content and turn it into a PDF- You have to create the pages yourself and save them as individual jpgs
Here is the demo version –
To be honest I am not that convinced by this one at all and seems to be creating more work than anything.
Drupal
OK, I know v little about Drupal even though I have access to a couple of sites I am just not as comfortable with them as I am with Joomla or Drupal so it’s not clear how this works but take a look
http://drupal.org/project/printIf you have articles in a category it looks like it would print them – I’ve not tested it but may do in the next month and report back here.
A Downloadable PDF magazine from your website content
So I had found three different plugins/extensions that could be used although I wasn’t convinced by any and thought the best thing to do would be to try and find a better way – maybe by seeking an external source of creating the PDF and then making that PDF available via the website
With Instapaper you can save web pages to read later – yes i did just copy that from their front page as I don’t use it. It doesn’t really fit the bill but what the hell.
The best that I saw and what i would recommend is
Zine Pal – it is by far the closest to what they wanted and would solve their problem, even if it did take some setting up. It is clear from some of the examples they demonstrate that it can be set up to function properly although when I have given it a half hearted try it has just listed every thing from the feed RSS I gave it and then it hangs onto your cookies for too long. But I can tell if you set it up carefully you could get some great results.
If you know of any ways to create a downloadable PDF magazine from your website content then let me know. The comments box is open on this post.
