Experimental project

This is a sandbox project, which contains experimental code for developer use only.

Slate is a nodequeue add-on created to manage daily queues of nodes with fine-grained control over elements of both chronological placement and absolute positioning.

For instance, imagine you have a busy site homepage and want to schedule out a day of stories. With Slate you can map out the day by adding Story A at 08:00, Story B at 09:00, and Story C at 10:00. Additionally, perhaps you want Story A to be the top story for most of day after it is published. You would insert it at 08:00 and Position 1. Thus, at 10:00 you would see the following node order:

Story A
Story C
Story B

Then, at 13:00 you want New Story to be the top story, so, you would insert it at 13:00 Position 1. This displaces Story A in the top slot, and forces it back into chronological rotation. At 13:00 you would see:

New Story
Story C
Story B
Story A

You can perform the following with an arbitrary number of positions, enabling you to, say, keep a node in position 3 all day long, even well positions 1 & 2 are always the latest.

Slate allows you to create an arbitrary number of queues and subqueues are generated on a daily basis (options to schedule on other intervals might be forthcoming if there is demand).

Slate provides a node edit form group for creating insertions, and several admin features on Slate owned nodequeues.

Slate also provides a basic API for attaching custom data to a certain daily subqueue, and is integrated with Token & Pathauto. Further, it provides a lightweight cron for publishing scheduled nodes and the caching of node loads & node views for performance (the typical use case would be for a homepage).

Many nodequeue functions have been re-implemented, though Nodequeue itself does not require any changes to use Slate. Hopefully a more robust Nodequeue API will make some of these unnecessary.

Dependencies:

- Nodequeue
- Date
- Date Popup (part of Date)

Slate was developed for the Fast Company family of websites, owned by Mansueto Ventures.
It will find its first active use on FastCoDesign.com shortly.

Project information