I am the editor of a news magazine, and we're trying very hard to move our base of operations to the internet. As a complete non-techie, I'm finding this difficult, to say the least!
Basically, I need a module whereby authenticated users can submit articles (along with image uploads); the articles would then be revised by me (with revisions shown in red, or something like that); the writer would read the revisions and potentially propose revisions of his own (shown in green or something); etc, until some sort of Final Product (TM) is created. Ideally, the entire process would be visible only to the user and the admin/editor (myself).
1) It seems like the core module "Story" would give me the (*basic*) features of article submission and revision (not exactly what I want, as you can see, but a start) - BUT I can't figure out how to make ANY stories (let alone only a specific user's stories) visible to authenticated users. I mean, *I* could barely even find the stories I had created - and I'm an admin!
2) A full solution (as opposed to the "Story" stopgap) would be a module that does all of what I mentioned above, of course... is there such a glorious tool? I've tried searching through the modules, but either I'm not searching for the right terms, or the explanations are too vague/technical for me.
I fully admit that I'm probably missing something (something huge, even), and any help/advice/direction would be very much appreciated.
~Ethan
Comments
As for creating content,
As for creating content, that is on your admin menu - called "Create content". Books are great for organizing content. Create some and when you create a new article assign it to a book using the "Menu setings" below the body of the article. You might want to install a module called "Directory". Directory gives you a listing of document. You can also assign articles to categories that you have made using the menus option under "Site building". Just make your categories and then assign them like mentioned for books.
I would install path, and nodewords. You can find this in the download modules section of this site. Give yourself and whoever will be in charge of this, permissions to assign keywords and URL paths.
Also, I would create a new group for the authors. Once the new group is made, give them the correct permissions to create content, to edit their own content, revisions. Go to "Access control" and find "node module" Assign "access content", "create story content", "edit own story content", "edit story content", "view revisions"
Have a nice day.
A few ideas
Basically you'll be looking for a few things:
A "node access" module to handle keeping nodes accessible only to those with the "author" and "editor" roles.
The Diff module (http://drupal.org/project/diff) when used with revisions to highlight the changes in each version. To make this simple you'll also want to go to Administer › Content management › Content types and edit whatever content type you're using (story or a custom type) so that it has the "Create New Revision" option selected by default so each submitted version of the story will create a new revision.
I would also recommend workflow module (http://drupal.org/project/workflow) to help manage the flow of the stories through editing and to publication.
Also the views module (http://drupal.org/project/views) is indispensable in creating lists of articles (i.e. a list of submitted but unreviewed, a list of second drafts etc) for keeping track easily of what is where.
A few other modules like path and quite possibly pathauto will make life much easier and give you nice clean meaningful URL's.
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Blog: Adding Understanding
Web Services: Brauer Ranch
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Thank you for both of your
Thank you for both of your advice. Quick question: I have the Views module, but... how can I use it?! Or, will it only work after I have set up a workflow.
See, my main problem is that I'm having a lot of trouble 1) figuring out where everything IS (Where do "Stories" go after they're created? I can only find them in the admin options; etc.), and 2) even understanding the terminology (for example, using Views is completely beyond me at thsi point).
That being said, I'll definitely upload Diff, Workflow, and a node access module and see if I can get them all to work together.
I'll keep ya posted :-p
~Ethan
Views can help solve the where do they go question
When a story is posted it appears at http://example.com/node/1 where 1 is a number that gets incremented with each new story. So your 25th posting will be at node/25 and so on. If the "Promote to Front Page" box is checked (and the story is published) they go to the front page as well and in Content Management > Post Settings you control how many appear on the front page. If they are blog posts for example they will also appear at blog/1 where 1 is the user number of the user who created the post.
But none of them are there until they are published.
You don't need workflow to make use of views. Views would allow you to create a page at any url you wanted. So you might create a "Awaiting Editing" page with the url editing-queue. You would then build that view to have all stories that have been submitted but have not been revised.
Basically workflow would allow you to assign both a status and a progression of statuses to your stories. So you might have a workflow with the following states draft, edited, final review, done. You can use these states in creating other views as well as using the actions module to do things like "When the workflow state is changed to done set the story to published."
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Blog: Adding Understanding
Web Services: Brauer Ranch
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The Good and the Bad!
This has been working amazingly well for me - thank you!
One problem that came up when I was using workflows: Somehow, the editing and viewing permissions I am giving an article's author for different states (e.g. cannot edit once he/she has changed the article from the 'Revise' state to the 'Revised' state) are being overridden. I'm not sure if it's because of the basic user permissions I have set (authors can edit their own stories), or because the view I have is set to see all stories by an author (which I suppose would conflict with the workflow permission I set in which I do not allow the author to view the article once it's been finalized)... or maybe it's something else entirely?
Any ideas are welcome :)
Revision Moderation
It's not exactly what you've outlined but I'd look at Revision Moderation. It allows the author to make changes but before displaying those changes on the website requires moderation. This way if authors catch something later they can still make changes and you can still decide if you want to release those changes to the site.
Also it seems Workflow Access should give this control but I haven't worked with it much.
After a long time using Taxonomy Access Control I've recently begun to look at Content Access http://drupal.org/project/content_access but don't know yet whether to recommend it.
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Blog: Adding Understanding
Web Services: Brauer Ranch
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