I'm wondering how difficult article management is using News for people who have a great many articles? The module doesn't seem to provide management features like SmartSection or AMS. You can't sort the articles in any particular way, yet people seem to manage.

So, I guess the question for sites which have a lot of articles is: How big a problem is this, and how are you dealing with it?

Thanks,
JFM

The big questions are: How do you want to sort your articles? Do you want users to have different sorting options (alphabetical, chronological, topical, by rating, most read, etc.?)

I run a few sites with quite a bit of articles on them. Some of the sites have over a dozen article categories; some with 6 or 7. One has 60. I have 100s of articles on them.

On the sites with only a few categories, you can make the topics to be visible in the Articles submenu.

For the sites that have soo many categories that it would look ridiculous to add to a menu, I usually create a table and put it under the xoops_content code in the theme.html.

An example is on the bottom of this page.

The only real problem I have with the news module is assigning the submitter's name to their articles. It either comes up as anonymous or uses the webmaster's id. There have been quite a few posts about this, and a few proposed solutions, but none of them have worked for me. As a result, I have to go directly into the php admin database, find the member user id number, go to the stories database and change the user. A real pain in the , particulary when you're dealing with a LOT of article submissions.

Beyond that, the news module categorizes articles pretty well when you choose the By Topic view in the module's preferences section. The latest version seems to work without a hitch, so far.

Hi gestroud, I'd like to know how you get your topics at the bottom of your pages. What code did you use? I'd like to achieve that as I dun like the default drop-down box. thx.

Good morning Mayhem,

I'm trying to figure out how to send you the code I used, but it won't keep its text formatting on the message board.

If you want to, send me a PM on XOOPS with your email address and I'll send the instructions to you.

Basically, it just a matter of creating a table containing the topics you want and opening up the theme.html for whatever theme your site is using.

Once you're there, look for "xoops_contents". It should be between a < div > < / div > tag under all of your center, left-center and right-center blocks.

Put a couple of line breaks after the final < / div > and place your table with your categories there.

It's a lot less confusing than it sounds. If you have any problems, feel free to contact me.