News system - brainstorming

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[MadeMyDay]

Hi,

I wonder how easy an enhanced news system can be done or especially HOW it can be done with modx. What do I mean with news system?

The modx document structure is hard to handle if you have a lot of news in different categories. Let´s say you have a online newspaper with about 50 news a day or a professional hockey club with >500 news a season. Of course you can put them as documents in different folders (=categories) and with ditto there is a powerful tool to display them in any way you want. But with the current manager/folder/document structure the news are hard to find and handle. I was wondering how to build a news system for modx and looked how other CMS do that. Okay, just looked at typo3 and joomla While Joomla is no serious CMS or has a special news management, typo3 has a plugin that writes the news into a seperate news table and has its own news management in the backend.

For me features of a news system are (in no particularly order) regarding an example of a professional hockey club website with >500 news per season and the possible binding to the modx structure are:

• Keywords: Possibility to add keywords to your news, for example "players,smith,victory". Could be done with an extra field in the document table and could also be used for tagging in blogs. The use of TVs also is possible but the not directly related to the document itself (yet), so export of the news´ data is difficult
• Display: Can be done with ditto and templates
• Management: Let´s say this hockey club doesn´t have categories where the news are put in (only one news category/folder) and the different displaying is only done with ditto. Then the management of these documents is very hard (500 documents in one folder...). So is it better to write these news in an extra table (like typo3) and build a extra manager for it or is it better to use the modx manager with a extra module that has more functionalities for handling the news/modx documents? For example ordering, searching for keywords, putting it to the layout, ordering, branding as top news and so on (perhaps via ajax ordering/drag&drop...)
• Image management: I read something about an upcoming better image manager. For this purpose here it would be very useful (or better essential) to write attributes of the uploaded images to a database. Like keywords (see above), size, dimensions, alternative text (also essential for accessibility) and so on. Of course it then would be neccessary to browse these images by these attributes and put them easily into the editor area or in TVs. So I think this is practical feature anyway
• Roles, workflow and versioning: Just read that this on the way, so I think it can be easily made with 1.0.

Just think about big news sites like slashdot (only know german sites beside that, but I think you know what I mean ). So another target group of modx could be heavy content based sites with frequent updating.

Perhaps a core developper could give a quick response how such a system could be done with the (upcoming) modx structure or if it would be better to design a new module/db-driven solution to handle a often updated and fast growing amounts of documents. What would be best for modx especially regarding the upcoming changes in the DB/manager structure?

1. Write a module for handling the current document structure?
2. Wait for the new structure and build a module for that?
3. Create an own news system, seperated from the document structure?
4. Everything on the new roadmap, shut up

Regards,
Marc

[PaulGregory]

I'm not a core developer, but I don't see any need to split news into a new table, as the present content table is sufficient for it. And most of the management problems would also occur in a large knowledgebase or other non-news site.

You can already do keywords.

The main problem is in the document tree view.
The ideal changes would be to:
1) Select which title field is used (I really think it should be the Menu title)
2) Select what order the documents are listed (ie by Menu Index or by date)
3) Have a "max children" setting, so that the News folder would list 10 stories and then a "...More Pages" link.
4) Have a listview of content pages, so page meta data can be seen in rows.
5) Have a "search content" facility in Manager to find the right page.

An alternative for 2) would be to have a routine that automatically set the Menu Index by the field of one's choice.

I'm not sure of the best way to do "Top News"; I have a similar requirement and have considered just having it in a different category. So one Ditto call would list all the Top News, then another all the other News. Effectively, Top News is a sticky - it is still at the top even though it may be older than less important news. Most other solutions end up with a dedicated field for that kind of thing.

[MadeMyDay]

Hi Paul,

4) Have a listview of content pages, so page meta data can be seen in rows.
5) Have a "search content" facility in Manager to find the right page.

These two points are very important for such a system. This could be combined with the AJAX-Sorting feature for a faster sorting of the items. The search facility should also display the results in this row view. Perhaps with an extra input field above each column for a quick search.

I have a similar requirement and have considered just having it in a different category. So one Ditto call would list all the Top News, then another all the other News. Effectively, Top News is a sticky - it is still at the top even though it may be older than less important news. Most other solutions end up with a dedicated field for that kind of thing.

Yes, I used a TV for this extra field, but would like to see this in the document table. Perhaps it would be possible to add a field that is customizable through another table. So you can put in this extra table the possible values for this custom field. Could also be used to define the language of this document or other custom things...

But you´re right, a different management view of the documents would be a first step.

[dernier_recours]

Of course you can put them as documents in different folders (=categories) and with ditto there is a powerful tool to display them in any way you want. But with the current manager/folder/document structure the news are hard to find and handle.

Why not something (a module?) that simply classifies news automatically by date folders?
example:

2006
    01
        news1
        news2
        ...
        news50
    02
    ...
    12
2005
    01
    02
    ...
    12

[MadeMyDay]

Sure, but an extra manager would be imho neccessary because there is no possibility to sort, search (by tags or whatever). To put the documents automatically in a time-based (or in categories by tags) wouldn´t be a big problem I think, this could be done by a plugin. But the handling of large amounts of documents stay uncomfortable.