By smazsyr on

I have searched for 30 minutes and not found an answer. Forgive me if I am missing the obvious.

I run a news site where I post most of the content, in the form of stories. But I also have among several dozen contributing bloggers a couple whose work I always promote to the front page.

I'd like to selectively assign them the right to promote their own blog entries to the front page, in case (as happens) I don't see right away that they've written something new.

I assumed that setting up a new user role (e.g. 'Senior Blogger') would let me accomplish this, but no. I also found I could create a new content type that I could give them access to that would default to the homepage, but these entries then do not wind up showing on their personal blog pages.

I'm guessing I'm not alone in this need.

Ideas, team?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

vm’s picture

vm commented

you were on right track with a new role, after the new role is created give them administer nodes permissions

_____________________________________________________________________
My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )

smazsyr’s picture

smazsyr commented

Thanks for the super quick reply! Here's my worry: I don't want to give them full keys to the castle. Just the ability to promote themselves, not edit others' works, which would come with administer nodes permission, no?

vm’s picture

vm commented

If its a trust issue then you are back to a custom content type that they can blog with and this custom content type will have to use something like views to create a list similar to the blog path.

Personally, If i trust someone to promote to the front page, I trust them to be able to control themselves with moderation of other tasks.

I don't personally use the blog.module, I always create a new content type that can be used as a blog which affords me more control and granularity.

I don't know of any module that allows you to allow users access to only promote to front page.

_____________________________________________________________________
My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )

smazsyr’s picture

smazsyr commented

Thanks for the help. Wish I'd thought of that four years ago! I feel pretty invested in the blog module, unfortunately. I'm guess some day we'll be able to assign this sort of permission on a per user basis.

Anyhow, if any other ideas come to you, please do post back here. Have a feeling I'll be struggling with this conundrum for a while.

joachim’s picture

joachim commented

I'm sure there's a module that adds a permission just for front page promotion.
The trick is finding it :)

.carey’s picture

.carey commented

I don't know how your front page is setup, but one option would be to setup a custom front page (page-front.tpl.php or frontpage module) and then include a php snippet (or use views) and pull the lastest post from specific bloggers, updating automatically when they create a new post.

smazsyr’s picture

smazsyr commented

My current front page is the default install. If I understand, this approach would allow me to create a page that *only* pulls in the specified authors, but leaves off other content that would normally go to the front page?

If so, it doesn't exactly fit the bill, though I'm grateful for your input. Seems like there might be a module in need of writing that could accomplish what I'm after, unless I am misunderstanding the nature of Drupal's core, which perhaps intentionally prevents this sort permissions granting.

Drat.

jfall’s picture

jfall commented

I'll be watching here, because this is exactly what I need.
My users post "news" stories, most of which are mundane and need not show up on the front page. Occasionally they need to post an "announcement" - something important that needs to appear on the front page. I had to make the announcements a different node type (so they would be promoted to the front page), but my users want these to also appear in their list of regular news. This issue can be solved by making the news listing a custom view that displays both node types, but is confusing for users who now need to select between two otherwise identical node types. Worse, because I'm using "Node Type" to select "Promote Status", the promote status must be (a) decided upon up front, before creating the node content; and (b) can't be changed afterwards by the user (since only admin can go in and de-promote).

I respectfully disagree with V.M. that if I trust someone to promote, I therefore trust them with absolute control over editing and deleting content. Giving someone more privileges than they need is almost always a bad idea, if only because accidents happen. My users are largely novice, and so don't want, and can't handle, all the options that come with full Administer Nodes access. Besides - obviously Drupal provides the concept of "trust them to promote", by providing it as a default for a content type. All I (we?) want is to be able to make that optional!

At present, my best guess at a solution would be:

  • Add a new CCK checkbox field to the blog page type, named "promote"
  • Use CCK Field Permissions module, http://drupal.org/project/cck_field_perms, to restrict access to the promote checkbox by role.
  • Use a custom View for the front page, to include teasers for nodes where this box is checked (in addition to all the regular stuff that is promoted.

I have not tried this yet (but it works in theory in my head ;-) - but it does seem onerous for something that seems (to me at least) to be a simple requirement?? I would think there really ought to be a "Use Workflow" or even finer grained permissions, say "Use Promote", on the Node access form.

For now I'm going to watch and see - I have yet to see a problem like this that some clever Drupler hasn't solved with a more elegant approach than my first take.

vm’s picture

vm commented

Personally, If I trust someone to promote to the front page, I trust them to be able to control themselves with moderation of other tasks.

And to respectfully provide clarification, My above comment was obviously not designed to be a method that would suit everyones needs based on parts of sentence bolded
_____________________________________________________________________
My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )

jfall’s picture

jfall commented

OK smazsyr - you got me interested, and a little deeper digging revealed enough clues to put together a very small module that implements hook_form_alter to intervene in the node-edit form.
The module provides a set of access options (on admin/user/access) to give access to the various parts of the "Publishing Options" fieldset (including all). Thus, you can give your "trusted users" only "Promote Content" access, and they will only see that option in the fieldset.

It was so easy I can hardly believe noone has done it (and I wouldn't be surprised to find that, in fact, someone already has.)
In any case, I can't attach the module here, so just contact me if you want to give it a try.
I'll post a reply here once I figure out a way to contribute this for everyone.

jfall’s picture

jfall commented

As I thought - indeed there is a module that does this...
http://drupal.org/project/override_node_options

I think my version gives a finer grain of control (so you can assign permissions for each option), so I also published mine at:
http://lasqueti.ca/node/218

When time permits, I'll look at integrating these two approaches... but first I need to get my CVS account going....