Improvement of scheduling workflow [#91686]

Addition of Schedule items for new programs

The scheduling workflow for new programs is somewhat difficult and should provide some additional guidance. Currently, once the user has gone to create content >> program and sucessfully submitted new program details it does not give them next step guidance.

Ideally once the new program entry has been created and the result displayed on screen after submission, there should be some business logic in the times area that detects that no times have been created, and a link (such as create new timeslot) should be displayed pointing them to admin/schedule/add to add a timeslot for the new program and pre-populate the Program Title field.
Repeating programs

Also, scheduling can be a bit of a nightmare for programs with reoccuring slots at the same time each day. Currently, you will need to add a new schedule item for each day the program is run.

Ideally, there should be some form of repeat options that could be set to automatically do this for the user to reduce the time spent creating the program schedule.
'Hiatus' Programming

The scheduling system does easily provide an option for hiatus programming. An example of this is when the show is off-air for a few weeks for breaks or whatever reason. To stop the show from appearing in the next schedule, you would have to delete the slot once the last program had screened. This however would show as a blank spot in the current week's schedule.

It would be preferable if a slot could have a start and end date assigned to it, so that when the end date has passed it will just automatically hide itself in the schedule. It would also however mean there would be need for an additional tab in station/schedule to manage and edit expired program slots.

Comments

Comment #1

drewish commented 28 October 2006 at 02:34

all good ideas, if you've got a budget to sponser some work...

Comment #2

drewish commented 30 October 2006 at 19:54

I really like the suggestion in #1, i went ahead and added a little code to pop up a message when you edit an unschedule program and give the admin a link to put it on the schedule. It might be more useful to have the link displayed to admin on the node view page, not just when editing it.

Suggestion #2 would be nice, but once you've got the schedule setup it's really not that critical. I'll keep it in mind when I'm working on the schedule editing form.

Suggestion #3 is a bit trickier, I'd like to think about it a bit. I'd like to add some functionality to allow for substitutions. Say one DJ wants to fill in for another who's on vacation, that way their show gets mapped into the archive correctly. I think that the hiatus stuff would be a natural fit with this.