Over the past few days, I've been completing a code overhaul of the news articles module (Restructuring and refactoring elements of the code into a more manageable form).

While looking at the elements at the top of the form, I have been tempted to merge a few into the following:-

{Categories, Search, Syndication} becomes Archive. The archive page would default to a category list showing a list of categories and the articles belonging to each (similar to this page). There is also scope to have a link to show the exact same format for authors.

The only piece of functionality we would be missing out on is the RSS feed to subscribe to the last 25 articles, but I think that can be added on the current listing page in the template.

{My Articles, Create Article, Approve Articles, Approve Comments} becomes Article Manager, the one stop page for managing all of these items.

So, we would then have:-

Current Articles, Archive, Article Manager, Admin Options at the top.

Doe sthis sound like a good idea?

I like the idea.. everytime we can cleanup / streamline a module, it would be beneficial in the long run.

Well it can serve multiple purpose it is more like reporting. For example if I have tutorial site where anyone can submit tutorials. In some cases people will post some one elses article as their own which is a copyright violation. So when a user click report it can retrieve the article id and a small comment section where user can report copyright violation or may be even an abuse or offensive words.

In another scenario if I have a site where I just keep the abstract of an article and put a link to the original site who wrote the article and decide to remove that will give a broken link on my site. An example of such site will be good-tutorials.com

I think your article module is very well thought and probably will not  cause any broken articles link other then if someone just bookmarks which gets deleted or moved.

The comments can serve the same pupose as well but a report can go to a separate email so it can be taken care of in higher priority. Also it will give an option not to enable comments and just use the report feature. It is just and idea so f it is easy to implement you can look at it. I am not sure if any other member needs it.

Over the past few years, the "default" template has received a lot of feedback as being too ugly, or at least too far away from the generic styles within DNN.

So, the new release will have a new standard template that will auto-apply to new installs. Old installs will still use the old default blue template.

What do you guys think of the screenshot below? It uses only core styles.

Hey Scott,

Looks great. Only thing I would suggest is having different background color for the footer with Kick It permalink...... May be a little darker than the article background itself. Can't wait for the new version.

Well no big deal it looks nice as is. We can always change the CSS to customize our own look.

Are you by any chance implementing the tinymce editor for articles? I  love how you have the code posted in your forums. It is always challenging to add code samples in the fckeditor.

TinyMCE will be a separate html/text provider - it is separate from news articles.

Attached is some more screenshots to do with layout.

1. Comments will now support gravatars
2. Post comment form will now be on the same page as the article
3. The templates (View.header.html, View.item.html, View.footer.html) are now merged into just View.item.html.
4. Comments will be referenced by using [COMMENTS] as opposed to being appended on to the article form.
   
5. [POSTCOMMENT] will display the comment form anywhere on the article screen.
   

The layout is just using core styles, so it might not look the greatest on the DNN blue skin, but you always have the option to customise to tailor towards your skin.