News features and NSN News 2.0

Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 6432

To initiate a discussion on News features, I've included a summarized list of features in NSN News, version 2.0. If you have other suggestions for improvements in News, please submit them here.

NSN News 2.0 offers several improvements over the standard News module:
- Supports single or dual column display
- Can notify article sumitter on approval
- Can authorize certain users to automatically post without moderation by an admin
- Can specify amount of text to appear on index / header
- Select new page or popup for read more links
- Can override user prefences for number of articles in home
- Can set home with only 1 topic
- Option to generate PDF of story
- Adds paging (eliminates the need for stories archive)
- Combines News, Topics, Submissions administration

In addition to what NSN News 2.0 currently does, I suggest the following improvements for news (+ indicates features included in NSN News Plus):
- Support old URLs so links to old articles aren't lost (NSN News changes the URL)
- Add program story options for start and / or end date / time (currently can only be done by # of hours in the future to stop story)
- Ability to specify sort order of stories (default is date descending) - this needs discussion
- Specify a single-column feature story (nice when you use dual display) or default latest story as feature
- Use theme-specific topics images + (just because Guardian2003 wants it Wink

)
- Specify / upload an image and location (align left, center, right, top, bottom) to be used instead of topic image
- Align topic images on left, right or alternating
- Turn on/off bytes more, article rating, related, options, most read story, comments warning (if not available, just say nothing) without requiring theme changes +
- Enable right blocks on article page +
- alter selection of number stories on main page if dual columns and / or feature story are specified (why have 5 stories if you use dual display)
- specify default for allow comments (current default is hardcoded as yes)

What other suggestions do you have?

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 11:15 am

I like the idea of theme specific icons killing me

'M' might be able to 'tap' the thing when complete.
I really, really, like the idea of having a single centered 'feature' artilce even if you have dual column display - thats a really nice touch.

Add if not already hidden somewhere in your list - Ability to set comments to;
NO by default
Registered only
Admin only

NB I have code to allow pdf creation if you need it.

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 11:33 am

PDF creation is already in NSN News 2.0.

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 2:20 pm

OK thanks for that kguske. I have never knowingly used NSN News 2.0 - I should have spent more time reading and digesting your post instead of skimming it.

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 2:38 pm

No problem! Ideas and suggestions are always welcome IMO. Which PDF tool do you recommend?

You can see the user side of NSN News 2.0 at [ Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login! ] (of course...)

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 4:33 pm

It looks like the one with NSN News would suffice. I have searched my hard drives and cannot locate the files I was tinkering with last year - I think they came as part of a theme so I downloaded the 'real' code from the scripts sourceforge site.
I'll have to plug on my older 200 Gig back up drive and see if it is on that one.

On a side note, something we should perhaps contemplate is the amount of 'white space' versus 'maximum number of characters allowed' in each articles main text box. There is nothing more ugly (to me any way) than having two nice neat columns of news only for the 'height' of each article to vary so that you end up with a mis-aligned bottom edge to the two columns.

Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2006 8:17 pm

There are ways to handle that in the themes, me thinks.

Regular Joined: May 07, 2006 Posts: 62

i noticed you mentioned swapping over the topic image
but i dont know if this is covered

would it be possible to have it so the image and text are on the same line say like this

testetstetstetstetstest ...................with the ........
fjsahfkjhsdjkfhfhkash .....................image...........
kjsdfhhfkjdshfjkhfjkht ......................Here..........
fjkldhsfjkhsgjkhskjghjksdhgjksdfjsghjahgjahkjgjkhasdg
kljsdghkjdhgjksdfh

does that idea make sense?

release date? for a modified version?

Posted: Sat Jul 15, 2006 8:35 am

No dates yet. Trying to determine the level of interest. If there's enough interest, I'll send proposed enhancements for review.

By swapping over the topic image, do you mean replacing the topic image with another picture? If so, I think that's a useful feature.

Posted: Sat Jul 15, 2006 9:05 am

I like the idea of changing the sort, but I also like the idea of being able to select one or more stories to always "go first". Maybe what I am really thinking of is your "featured article" concept. I envision being able to mark any article as a "featured article" so that one or more can be placed into a "Featured Article" container.

Now, to discuss the "container" concept. Wouldn't it by nice to be able to lay out your own front page display of news articles? Different types of articles could be targetted for certain layout "containers". It is difficult to describe, but is what I've basically done with NukeForge (that I never released because the admin tool would be terribly complex - just not enough time to complete it).

Anyways, probably too "nebulous" an idea to discuss in a simple forum post.

Posted: Sat Jul 15, 2006 9:54 am

motego, I think the 'container' concept is already in use for news, more or less as you described it - at least for the main page layout. I think it was something metopen.com did.

Posted: Sat Jul 15, 2006 9:56 am

Some tools take a template approach. What about that?

Posted: Sat Jul 15, 2006 11:53 am

Easy and quick installation. I haven't checked the new stuff, but what turned me off from a lot of NSN scripts in the past is that you have to modify 47,000 files. Smile

Posted: Sat Jul 15, 2006 11:57 am

differnt page posts, instead of just front page?

differnt sections on the site for differnt kinds of news

that possible?

Posted: Mon Jul 24, 2006 11:04 am

manunkind,
Having to modify a few (c'mon, it isn't THAT many) core files to support significantly enhancement functionality is a good trade-off, in my book. And, with RavenNuke, you can get that already modified (e.g. NSN Groups, NukeSentinel). Really, if you look at the improvements, the required modifications make sense.

Still, I hear you on installation. Most of the NSN Scripts are pretty easy to install. Raven set the standard with the RavenNuke installation script.

ravenlife,
What do you mean by different page posts?
At one time, there was a concept called sections, but it was pretty difficult to distinguish that from Topics. Would topics give you that?

Posted: Mon Jul 24, 2006 11:39 am

Yes the Sections module was dropped in phpnuke 7.4 - ish in favour of the existing Content module.

New Member Joined: May 12, 2006 Posts: 23

Four additions I would like to see in the next release of NSN News...

I would like to see the ability to have topics restricted to various user levels and the ability to activate/inactivate individual topics. This would be useful when you have a topic but have not submitted any news for it. It would also allow an admin to deactivate a topic from public view, so no one sees it and the information is not lost or deleted.

Google tapping should be required for all modules and all links should be search engine friendly. The random headlines block needs to be google tapped too.

For us, a very important feature we would like to see in NSN News is the ability to list news postings with multiple topics. Each of our artists has a topic, but many times multiple artists will play an event. The news posting for that event would fall under multiple artists, in this case topics. Simply setting the Associated Topics does not allow that posting to be seen under all topics it is associated to. Simply put, we would like to be able to post a single time for multiple topics.

Also, for RSS or other feeds, include a rewrite of image tags to include the full absolute URL. i.e...
img src="/images/folder/filename.ext" to
img src="http://www.domain.com/images/folder/filename.ext"
This would assure that images associated and within news postings are correctly displayed on other sites.

Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2006 9:11 pm

I think someone else requested multiple topics per story, too. That's interesting.

Rewriting image tags is also an interesting idea. But should the rewrite be done when the story is posted, rather than each time it's displayed via RSS?

Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2006 10:48 pm

I think the general rewrite of image url's is a good idea, but I would also want to consider users that update to the new version of this module and do no already have absolute URL's.

Posted: Fri Aug 04, 2006 9:49 am

Another idea for the next version of the news module....

I would like to see the ability to edit the page title of news article and topic categories.

Posted: Fri Aug 04, 2006 11:46 am

By page title, do you mean what appears in the top of the browser?

Posted: Fri Aug 04, 2006 11:52 am

Yes, the HTML <title> tag.

Posted: Fri Aug 04, 2006 2:46 pm

Quote:

Google tapping should be required for all modules and all links should be search engine friendly. The random headlines block needs to be google tapped too.

Be careful what you "require". If you mean "made optional" the way Montego is making it for the next Ravennuke release that's fine. But, believe it or not, some web admins would ban all search engines if there was a way and have no interest in GoogleTap or any derivative thereof.

The features you all discussed look great to me and I'd love to see them incorporated by default into some future revision of Ravennuke so you just run Raven's great install program and there it all is.

Client Joined: Jan 21, 2006 Posts: 87 Location: Arizona

montego wrote:

I like the idea of changing the sort, but I also like the idea of being able to select one or more stories to always "go first". Maybe what I am really thinking of is your "featured article" concept. I envision being able to mark any article as a "featured article" so that one or more can be placed into a "Featured Article" container.

Just adding my vote for all the above

Also I vote for fix to eliminate the problem of "mis-aligned bottom edge to the two columns" view. Maybe add an admin feature to adjust block height to a fixed value so regardless of how many characters are present in the articles or white space, the blocks will have a uniform size. Cause any overflow to automatically go into the read more section.

I like the turn off/on button for article rating, etc...

How about add the ability for admins to pick and choose wether or not to strip html tags, an On/Off switch, or to give certain users the ability to submit articles without restriction. I had an issue where some of my users where trying to submit articles with images links stored on imageshack. They kept getting banned from my site, I had to manually code the information for them.

Finally give us the edits necessary to integrate the WYSIWYG editor.

Posted: Sat Aug 05, 2006 10:36 am

I like the WYSIWYG editor option and am disappointed that the code to make it happen is not already out there. I would like to see a config option to set the WYSIWYG as on/off, basic/advanced, for Admin/Regular users. I also like the idea of toggling the WYSIWYG on the fly and below are some links for that...

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