Improve channels feature

I asked this today too - I think the answer is no. If I understand properly, you need to have a channel active in order to assign an item to it.

It seems like it would be easier to click on the star next to a news piece and have a list of your channels there to put it in. ......at least I think that's how I'd use it....= )

The answer is no: right now, you can't use channels very well for sorting.

We built channels with having collecting into a single channel in mind. The user story was having very few channels, research news for a specific channel and collect into it.

This is definitely a good feature request.

think it would be worth grouping all of the feature requests into one thread so that the dev(s) can comment on what's worth doing, what's crazy, what's reasonable, etc..and open to clean group feedback? just a thought...

#4: http://drupal.org/project/issues/managingnews?text=&status=Open&prioriti...

; )

After a couple of more in-depth conversations with people using and building on Managing News, the desired improvements are starting to shape up more concretely. Let me summarize.

Status quo/problems:

Right now a user can create one or more channels and then add news items to an "active channel". A channel can be set active by selecting it from a widget on the bottom of the screen and confirming the selection. New channels can be created on the same screen by supplying a title and confirming it.

This workflow is too cumbersome for quickly sorting feed items into various channels while skimming them. Further it makes adding new channels on the fly harder than it should be.

Goals:

• Improve 'sort' use case where news need to be sorted into different channels.
• Make it easier to create a new channel on the fly.
• In addition, allow for a more liberal use of channels (creating many, showing only a few).

Proposal:

In order to achieve the goals above we should shift our paradigm from adding items to a channel to free tagging items and then creating channels from tags (not directly from items). A user would go through news items and free tag them (just like taxonomy module's free tagging option); on the channels section, the user would later create channels for one or more specific tag(s).

Tasks (high level):

• Add data_feed_syndication / term_data cross table (in addition to the existing cross table for geo terms?)
• Add AJAX tagging UI.
• Add listings for tagged items (integrated in channels section? in Feeds section?).
• Adjust channels CRUD (as easy as enabling the same taxonomy for channel content type), adjust channels listings.
• Write upgrade script.

Codebase: http://github.com/developmentseed/mn_channels

Similarly, it would be convenient to be able to add all items from a feed to a channel by default (which becomes much easier with the tagging direction, but a nice UI would also be helpful)

Use case: using MN to aggregate data from many different google news search queries; but those queries are for very specific items of interest; yet fit inside broad business-category buckets which would ideally be able to be mapped and tracked as a whole (e.g. all news about the following 10 search queries should always be labeled "Partners")

it would be convenient to be able to add all items from a feed to a channel by default

BIG +1 I AGREE

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This is implemented and will be rolled out with beta 7 next week. Sneak preview here - http://managingnews.com/previews/mnbeta7preview.tar.gz

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