Hi, great project from the guys from the lab. To test your module set, I have installed with innovationnews.profile.

Some dumb questions -as far as i can get it, the term used as 'editions' are the issues of the newspaper, or magazine i.e week 1-2-3 or month right? If so, how to create more 'edition' apart from the 10 given as default? Could the editions like setting taxonomies based on date? It might be just my confusion, since there is not much of documentation regarding to your modules set.

And since with the innovationnews install profile the date.module is not installed, how its possible to sort the 'editions' weekly, daily or monthly basis? (this one is more like an issue for the innovationnews.profile)

thank you

Comments

john.karahalis’s picture

john.karahalis commented

Thanks for the interest in our contributions and thank you for the feedback.

Yes, the term edition is synonymous with issue in terms of purpose. An edition of news stories serves the same purpose as an issue of a magazine or newspaper - to group several stories together for one cohesive release. For example, imagine you were using Innovation News on a political website. In such a case, you might want to put all stories relating to the Democratic convention into one edition. Or, you might want to compile weekly editions which contain stories pertaining to the week's most important and interesting developments. Basically, the use of editions allows users to say "Ok, time to catch up with the latest news from example.com. I already read Edition #1, now it's time to read Edition #2."

If you would like to use more editions than the 10 that are available by default, simply navigate to Administration > Site Configuration > Edition Manager (admin/settings/editionmanager) and increase the number of editions.

If I understand correctly, you would like to be able to have editions automatically created weekly/monthly/etc? Innovation News does not have this ability as it assumes that editions will be created manually. What you are describing though, is possible with other modules. Views, of course, comes to mind. And while I have never used the Date module, it does explain that it has the ability to "add flexible date-based grouping". As you point out, the Date module might very useful to the Innovation News Installation Profile. I will look into it next week.

If I have misunderstood any of your concerns, or you have other questions or ideas, please contact us and let us know. It's great to be working with the community.

ica’s picture

ica commented

Thank you for your reply,
yes i found out the admin/settings/editionmanager. Maybe it would be better if its all managed i.e /control-center/editionviewer
- set edition

rather than at /settings/editionmanager

also on the /editionmanager
-imho it would practical and space saving a dropdown selector than many radio button selectors as it is now.. it would be taing too much space if/when edition no's grow.

-i think it's a work in progress as you noted -"This is the Control Center. More information will be added later"

could be tabs
/control-center.......... | editionviewer | editionmanager | editnews |

You also understood much better than i tried to explained possible interaction/integration with the date.module . If you install and tryout the date.module and have a loo at the date function/code you will figure out possibilities Innovation News & the date seem to created for each other to play with :)

Also I understand you are working on CCK that would be useful too. for cases that to be able to configure more specific node type fields on top of plain 'article' by using CCk filed module sets .ie. extra text.field (for fieldds like 'spot' text to regular article, email.field, image.field, em.field (embed field), link.field, date.field, currency.field etc.

Also your http://opl.cias.rit.edu/inews/ looks great
I liked to view the edition PDF's and print out from the web concept.. -turning the printing/web process the other way around!

Could you explain or point out how did you achieve the processing/presenting PDFs on the site? On the profile there is not seem a setting or a PDF view module.
thank you

regards

john.karahalis’s picture

john.karahalis commented

Regarding the Innovation News Installation Profile:
I will be sure to add links to pertinent settings on the Control Center page for 1.0 final. CCK will be used in 1.0 final, but very few fields will be created by default (at present, a "Location" field which will integrate with a Google Earth module and a "Author" field which will be used in user-contributed news). The beauty of Drupal, though, is that it gives you plenty of flexibility to add any additional fields if you desire.

Regarding the Innovation News module:
I like your suggestion to use a select box in the Edition Manager. If all works out well, this modification will be available in 1.0 final of the Innovation News module.

Thank you for your compliments regarding our own Innovation News setup. PDF generation was not built into the installation profile as we used proprietary software - Adobe InDesign - to generate the PDFs. Although I don't know all of the specifics, I believe that InDesign was able to import the XML output of the Edition Viewer and use that data to create PDFs. We of course can't distribute InDesign with our software, and do not know of any Drupal-based alternative which meets our needs nearly as well as InDesign does. That said, the Open Publishing Lab is working on some open source non-Drupal software which may be able to achieve a similar task. In future releases of Innovation News we may be able to, in some way, use that software in place of InDesign.

ica’s picture

ica commented

Thank you for your reply improvements on your roadmap for CCK and the CP sounds great

and thanks considering my suggestions too. Since you welcome and open to ideas, thinking over further, I have few more suggestions to enrich the Innovation News Installation Profile for you consideration:
-------------------------------
I have not tested but there is a auto PDF (+print+email) creation module to omit your PDF creation workflow you mentioned.
http://drupal.org/project/print
(uses gpl- TCPDF or dompdf libraries -checkout the SourgeForge for those libs)
features
Web page printer-friendly version (at .example.com/print/nid)
PDF version (at .example.com/printpdf/nid)
Send by-email (at .example.com/printmail/nid)
-------------------------------
more specific node mapping module with gmap or yahoomaps alternatives
http://drupal.org/project/nodemap
-------------------------------
more flexible alternative to the core image module
http://drupal.org/project/node_images
-------------------------------
a useful additional feature suitable newspaper format -nifty small module specifically for image caption (can also be done with custom CCK but with this module no need for a CKK image caption type if one one to achieve a caption feature)
http://drupal.org/project/image_caption
-------------------------------

john.karahalis’s picture

john.karahalis commented

Wow, great finds! I had never heard of any of these modules but they are all very interesting.

As 1.0 final of the installation profile will be released within a week, it is doubtful that we will be able to test and integrate these modules by that time. But these certainly provide interesting possibilities. We will definitely consider using them in a 2.0 (or maybe 1.5) release. And of course, if you don't want to wait that long you can always add them to your site post-install.

ica’s picture

ica commented

Yes, I have already installed and I am testing some of them module on a dummy site.
so far the print.module PDF gives errors, at the first instead its related to the dompdf lib folder not being full chmod access when its set to rwxrwxrwx it works fine.
I am going to test with the TCPDF lib as another option.

despite the errors with domPDF i was be able to print/download as PDF both the front page and nodes as well, but there is css settings issue to be set/redesigned specifically for the module PDF's to get the layout/fonts/style close as much as to the site overall look... styling for PDF is a bit challenge

also in terms of css style compatibility dompdf lib is better than the TCPDF as noted on the print.module install.txt

also nodemap.module works fine with defaults to Yahoomap and not be able to choose Gmap instead.

I still have to test image caption and the node images and see.

ica’s picture

ica commented

I found out this Newspaper' format Drupal distro 'Prosepoint' today
Check it out from the demo, they did exactly what i thought for The Innovations -the date.module integration and they also have a CCK type called 'channels' and their own modules to manage + a customised theme build a subtheme of the Zen theme

http://demo.prosepoint.org/
user:demo
pass:demo

http://demo.prosepoint.org/node/add/edition

to download the distro to have a look
http://www.prosepoint.org/download

john.karahalis’s picture

john.karahalis commented

Very interesting. Thanks for the link, I'll look into this site and what it offers.

john.karahalis’s picture

john.karahalis commented
Project: Innovation News » Innovation News Installation Profile
Version: 6.x-1.2-beta4 » 6.x-1.0

Changed Project to Innovation News Installation Profile.