w4z suggested in this post:
http://xoops.sourceforge.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=22&forum=3that I post this here.
You guys have done a great job here on Xoops. Somebody finally has a decent implementation of a module infrastructure. I have looked at the code and I can see that it is going to be easily modifiable, and easy to find where in the code you need to modify to achieve your desired customization.
This was mentioned a bit in the post linked to above, but the biggest thing I see missing from XOOPS (and all Nuke variants as well), is a robust implementation of managing articles. Articles are different from news. The XOOPS implementation of news is great, because news comes and goes and it dies after awhile.
Articles on the other hand stay around and users on your site may refer to them over and over again. For this reason, the implementation of articles needs to be different than news.
I believe this is why the sections module was created, to serve as a repository for articles. The current sections implementation is bare bones, and is a good starting point, but there is quite a bit of functionality still missing to make it a good article manager (helping move the XOOPS system more into the CMS world as well as the Portal world).
Therefore, I'm hoping the XOOPS team will consider updating the Sections module with additional functionality such as the following:
1) Categories under Sections with navigation.
2.) Additional data on articles, including intro text, body text, author (user), related links.
3.) Ability to comment on articles using current comment functionality.
4.) Ability for users to suggest / submit articles for sections.
5.) An associated side block for most recent articles.
6.) Implement related article functionality so articles can be linked, or else the ability to write multi-page articles.
There are probably going to be some people out there that say "why not just use the news module for articles"? That is a legitimate question, but I reiterate that the nature of news and articles are different for the reasons I mentioned above and thus require a different means of navigating through them.
If these six items could be implemented in Sections, I think the community would greatly benefit and expand.
There apparently appears to be a large interest by the community at large for an eGallery. That's cool, but I think this needs to be right up there as well.
Thanks for reading this long post, and thanks to the team for a great new product...
