I'm new to DNN, so please forgive me if this has been asked or even addressed in the module.  I am exploring changing our web site over to DNN, for a number of reasons.  However, there are certain things that we're currently happy with about our existing content management system, and so I'm trying to see if we can achieve them, or something similar, with DNN.

Some questions:

1.  Automatic Bios.  Our site has several thousand contributors of content -- articles, resources, documents, and so on.  When a contribution is made, the contributor's brief bio and photo are automatically included on the same page below the contribution.  Here is an example:

http://charitychannel.com/publish/?a=5495&z=16

Is this something that this module currently provides? 

2.  Automatic List of Other Contributions by a Contributor.  On our existing site, article pages currently provide a link to our search engine, which brings up a page that displays all contributions by that particular contributor.  In the example in question 1, you'll see a link "Other CharityChannel articles contributed by this author."  It points to our search engine, querying the database for all contributions from that particular contributor.  Is this something that this module currently provides? 

3.  Links to Related Resources.  On our existing site, article pages enable the contributor (and others with appropriate roles) to link to related resources on the site.  I realize that links can be manually created when creating the content; however, our current system has the ability to do this by entering an article number into a screen for this purpose, and then puts the article summary and link onto the page.  It also puts a link on the other article, so that both articles now refer to each other.  You can see this in the example provide in question 1 above.  Is this something that this module currently provides? 

Thanks in advance for your patience with my questions!

Here is my vote for a 'related articles' widget although I'm not sure what would be the best way to implement it. One way could be to have a function for the article editor to select from a list of other articles and add them to the article as a series of links.

Even better would be a seperate control (similar to 'latest articles) that would contain the related article links and could be dropped anywhere on the page. If you look at news sites such as www.smh.com.au or http://news.bbc.co.uk they use this feature a lot and (I believe) get a very high click through rate.

Just my 2c!

True..

Right now I would use an RSS feed to achieve this which involves manually searching for the relevant article and adding the rss link to that module.

So if there were 1000's of articles the 'related articles' widget would perhaps need to use the existing search function ie search the articles and check them to add them to the display list.

I'll do some more research on how other CMS handle this.

With respect to "Related Stories":

If there were a way down the road to create sub-catagories, then could that suffice as a related stories relationship for most applications?  For example:

Categories
  Vehicle News
   - Cars
   - Boats
  Dog News
   - Little Dogs
   - Big Dogs

Now, when you create a story about boats, you can add it to the boat sub-category, and optionally list related news that simply pulls from the top-N of the same sub-category (vehicles/boats).

just dribbling thoughts here

Regarding Related stories:

Could the search function be used to come up with matches.

I'm very pleased to see the discussion about this.  In our current system, there are thousands of articles, yet it is quite easy to link any given article to "related articles."  Here's how it's done, from a workflow perspective: 

In the article editing screen, one can click on a "related articles" link, which brings up the search engine page.  You can then search for related articles just as you would for any article.  The system has article numbers, corresponding to the identifier in the database.  You just type in the article number, and voila, it's now linked. 

It's occurred to me that it might be helpful if I put together a Flash-based walkthrough of our current system using Macromedia Contribute, so you can see it as if looking over my shoulder. I'm happy to chip in the time to do so, since I'm very excited to know that ideas such as mine have a receptive ear from those who can actually make it happen.  Just say the word, and I'll do it. 

As far as Bios go, I hope you can make this design flexible. In my case, I already have my own custom userprofile\bios page. And so would like to be able to refer to mine rather than another one.

My userprofiles\bios are viewable from a control in another tab with a userid parameter passed in.

Jason

Thanks. I'm not going to look at or add this module to my site for a couple months yet but I already love it! I want to see some more demo sites. Those really get me excited when I see all the customizations that are possible!

Jason

Hi Scott,

I'm revisiting this discussion that I started a little over a year ago. I'm wondering if either of these features have since been created?

• User bios
• Related articles

Thanks!