UMN Usability: Change "story" content type to "article" or "news"

tag for newbie
needs to be for d7 due to lang string freeze

Changing the machine readable name of this will also break some contrib stuff (for example views node type arguments and filters) - so would need to be documented carefully.

No major preference between article or news.

to me, this is change for the sake of change. well, "news" is actually worse than "story" since a single post can be correctly called a story but can't grammatically be called a news.

That's a good point, I think 'article' has a lot of advantages though.

I agree that 'news' is not better than story. I think that 'article' is better than 'story'. This is of course somewhat subjective though.

GreenJelly has strong opinions about this and also suggested 'article': http://groups.drupal.org/node/8377

I support this change.... Sign me up to a petition:)

In

+      'description' => st("An <em>article</em>, similar in form to a <em>page</em>, is ideal for creating and displaying content that informs or engages website visitors. Press releases, site announcements, and informal blog-like entries may all be created with an <em>article</em> entry. By default, a <em>article</em> entry is automatically featured on the site's initial home page, and provides the ability to post comments."),

that last instance of "By default, a ..." should probably be an "an" as well.

(It is also worth noting that the "entry" stuff in the descriptions (with the exception of blog entry) is mainly there because it sounded so odd to just say "story" in the first place.)

Edit: And, by the way, "article" would be a significant improvement over "story", IMHO.

Small semi-offtopic comment, but in a quick review of "HTML 5 differences from HTML 4"^[1] I note that in section "3.1 New Elements," there is the addition:

"article - represents an independent piece of content of a document, such as a blog entry or newspaper article."

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-diff-20080122/

I know allot of these issues sound so small but each small problem adds up to a major issue. Even within the API, we must be vigilant about the names for functions and classes. As we grow, development using these naming conventions will become a larger issue. "I dont think we should ever say, thats too minor for it to be an issue"

We should do away with separate code for "Articles" and "Blogs", and simply include a way to add new simple nodes named anything you want... CCK is probably too much for allot of simple text, but maybe using cck to manage this content in future versions is the way to go!

AKA code unification... Multiple ways to do the same thing leads to undesirable complexity... Using 2 sets of code to do the same thing means 2x the maintenance. Just an idea...

+1: I agree with most if not all commenters here, that "article" is much better than "story".

"News" on the other hand is no good choice for three reasons:

• "News" has a singular<->plural problem (see #4)
• "News" is much too specific. The "story" aka "article" node type is not only usable for news, it is the default content type for everything but static pages.
• "News" tends to be confounded with aggregated news or rss feeds.

My three-and-a-half cents... ;)

Article is good, news is bad.

Incidentally, applied, works, good idea. RTBC.

Well you guys enjoy, obviously the higher ups have decided that my contributions here are not worth it.

Goodbye

I think "article" is better then "story".

This was very confusing during formal usability testing, and I think calling it 'article' might have helped a little (although 'page' caused just as many, if not more problems). Another +1.

Committed to CVS HEAD. Thanks.

I support this change.... Sign me up to a petition:)