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By wells on
I am attempting to find a way to use Drupal to generate what we call "news clippings". These are (currently) emails that we send out frequently with a major topic (e.g.: Mexico) and anywhere from 10 to 100 links to news stories from a certain period organized in to sub-topics (e.g.: energy, agriculture, health, etc.). The problem is that we do this for about 20 different major topics and many of the "clippings" overlap, yet because we have no central database of these clippings each person working on an email for a major topic has to search out links, organize them in to sub-topics and prepare an email to send out.
My thought on how to alleviate and streamline this is to have two content types:
1) Article - for each individual article ("clipping"), to include fields for title, source, date, summary and taxonomy terms.
2) News Clippings - for a page on a major topic allowing a user to search for (using the terms and dates), select and include nodes of the "Article" content type and organize them in to lists.
However I am running in to a wall trying to come up with a way to get that second content type together using existing modules. I have tried using Books but I could not find a way to select from and include existing nodes in a book. I have also tried Nodequeue but had no luck setting it up to serve this purpose.
Does anyone know of existing modules that may be able to help me achieve this? My thought if something doesn't exist is that I may be able to use Nodequeue's Smartqueue API to do what I want with a custom module... perhaps.
Thanks,
Chris
Comments
Try views instead?
I would do this one of two ways:
1) Content type Article like you described. Assign them to taxonomy terms, then use the taxonomy term page to display them.
2) Use views to display Articles associated with a term. You could also "expose" filters to allow visitors to sort and set criteria.
It is possible to reference a node from a node with modules such as "Reference." That's the only way to really have an arbitrary list of articles. That seems like too much data entry for me. I'd rather categorize the articles as I create them, and dynamically display them latter.
Views...
Views was actually my first thought as well, I just couldn't wrap my head around it. Maybe with some more thought I can come up with something where a person could select the "major" topic and a date range, and I could build out a custom views display that would sort the sub-topics neatly in to categories. The only problem with this is that we still want to ultimately send these things as emails and they need some sort of editorial ability to say, "oh wait, I don't want this one article in this list" or "this article should be the first one in this list" - something I don't think I can achieve with Views alone.
I'll look in to using Reference. I agree that it is too much data entry, but the ability to send these as emails and play with the sorting and listings is something that the people responsible for this content are not yet willing to give up (despite my attempts to convince them otherwise).
Thanks for your input.
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I'm not sure I understand, why would using taxonomy force you to give any of that up?
\o/
Well, say we have 10 articles tagged as "Mexico" and "Health". Using a view, one selects the primary topic "Mexico" and the view finds those 10 articles and plops them under the "Health" sub-topic. But the person who wants to send this email decides that the sixth article in the list of health articles is the most important and should appear at the top of the list of health articles - essentially the person would need the ability to arbitrarily sort (or exclude) articles in each sub-topic list.
To be fair, I haven't even given any thought yet to the step that will bring a view to an email, but theoretically these editorial intricacies could be handled at that level.
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The ability to arbitrarily sort a view can be added with the nodequeue module. And there's a couple of modules for emailing a view... views_send, simple_subscription, and simplenews spring to mind but there may be others.
Nodequeue
Really? I don't know how I missed that. I think between the Views + Nodequeue and References options I should be able to get this figured out. Thanks for the input!