I've been working through some changes for the news articles modules and I am interested in getting opinions on a few items:-

The Top Menu

Should it disappear? And the selections chosen by the context menu?

• Categories would disappear altogether because of a new module called "News Categories" that would display a similar list.
• Search would disappear altogether because of a new module called "News Search"
• Syndication would automatically appear on relevant pages, e.g. there maybe a module called News Authors with links to the relevant syndication. (Same with category syndication).

Create Article

The create article page is quite long, should it be replaced by a much simpler tabbed interface to assist in creating simple articles as well as the ability to create more complex articles.

The whole idea would be to avoid scrolling, but also provide the least amount of options on the first tab to post an article.

The least amount of options would be:-

• Title
• Categories
• Summary/Text
• Publish Date

The rest of the options might be pushed to the advance tab. (the same with multiple page articles)

Should summary become optional? And be auto-generated from the articles text if not supplied, so each article would have at least 1 page. I know some people use it like I use my blog where I have a title and a long summary only. I'm just throwing up ideas here at the moment.

More to come, I'm working on the "News Archives" at the moment.

Hi Scott,

Thanks for opening the discussion.

I would like the option to keep or remove the the top menu. Perhaps you can add a checkbox to the admin page or turn it into a token or something. On the one hand moving those functions to separate modules really adds flexibility, but on the other hand it can also add clutter and take up valuable real estate. The top menu really gives me the ability to keep it clean. I can see the value of both use models and would actually implement the module differently on different sites if I had the option.

The change I would love to see on the top menu is the ability to change the term "articles" to a term of my choice on a per module basis. That would really open this module up for a lot of different uses.

As for the article entry page, simplification would be good. I like the idea of one entry area with auto-summary and auto-paging. You already have the tag [SUMMARY:XXX] perhaps you could create a tag called [PAGETEXT:XXXX] or give the ability to set the page length in the article entry page. I'm not sure what this entails.

I don't know if it is feasible, but it would also be nice to be able to toggle passing formating to the [SUMMARY:XXX] tag. Currently the limited summary tag strips html formating but the full summary does not. I think you mentioned before that this is a problem with counting characters.

I hope these ideas are useful for discussion. None of them are showstoppers for me. I am perfectly content with the module as is. Of course, I am looking forward to the archive module .

Cheers!

Hi,

I agree totally, and think the article creation is long. I think the summary is mandatory, and should be auto-generated if left empty ... like the first 150 characters. I really like this in other News Articles i have used in the past. The tabbed idea is excellent!! as i do think a simple article

For the Top Menu, i think it would be best to have it displayed when a user goes to view your full article, like when clicking on the summary or more... to read the whole thing. It kind of acts like an index or a way to view other articles in my opinion.

But i think on the main view, where your 10 newest summarys are, maybe have it at the bottom. Like to see past articles or navigate the complete articles system. Even as a separate module would be cool. This way, the admin can put it anywhere. Not sure what you mean by context menu though.

Thanks,

Gary

Sorry context menu is bad wording, I mean the default dotnetnuke menu that appears in the top left hand corner of your module.

If you want to change the term articles based on a config option, I would need to make it key off an entry in the resx file still. So you would need to add an entry in there, otherwise it would be hard to do localization.

Thanks for all the other ideas, I'll be changing things around mid-week and I might post back if I have more questions.

Hi Scott,

if there are things that I don't like about this module - then these are it !

I've been looking around a little (and using your module since the early days) - and I think that all these changes are more then welcomed (= I would prefer if you would organise things like this - it gives me much more freedom and easy while working with your module)

thnx,
Vladan Strigo
NETMedia

nice very nice

thnx,
Vladan Strigo
NETMedia