Portal News

Portal News is a self-updating news portal built on Drupal 11. Instead of an editorial team writing stories by hand, a scheduled import job pulls in The Guardian's World RSS feed and turns each item into an Article — headline, excerpt, lead image, topic tags, byline and a clear attribution link back to the original story — stored in the site's MariaDB database. It checks for new items automatically and never creates duplicates when a feed is re-fetched. The site is a deliberate aggregator: it shows excerpts with prominent credit, never full article text, and every story and photo belongs to the original publisher.

Everything a visitor sees reads from that same database, so it's always in sync with the latest import: the homepage with its lead story and "latest" list, individual article pages, topic listings such as "Environment", and a site-wide search with tag and date facets. Everything is styled with a small design system of colour and spacing tokens, self-hosted fonts, and a mobile-first layout that needs no CSS framework and almost no JavaScript.

Under the hood the front end is built with Drupal Canvas, a visual page builder, on top of a library of Single Directory Components (hero banner, news card, term teaser, sidebar widget, header and footer, newsletter signup, and others) in a custom theme. Small custom modules cover what configuration alone couldn't: picking the best-resolution image from the feed and building the daily newsletter digest.

Readers subscribe with just an email address, stored in that same database. Once a day, the digest module reads what's new since its last run and emails subscribers a responsive HTML summary with a one-click unsubscribe link — so while the site checks for fresh stories every few minutes, subscribers get one clean email a day instead of a flood.