Hi Mamba,

If your going to start development on a news/content module, please please please base it upon article by phppp. I've said it many times before, it is a great module with great features already built in, it can be used for news or a blog.

It just needs bug fixing and updating and some features added.

Please consider basing it upon article.

Thanks

Article by phppp was interesting, but not user friendly. To complicated (with strange CPanel), not usefull for creating content section (e.g. book, almanach) and managing static pages, I think.

Quote:
It is just your idea.
IMO phppp Article was more user friendly than many other modules.
There are some conflicts in xoops between a "Nice GUI" like module admin class by Mage and user friendly module. they are totally different.
Article admin area is not catch-eye but it was user friendly because:
- many end users have installed it in their websites.
- there are a few questions for its functioning in xoops.org forum and you know it is one of the comlicated and full-featured content module at that time.
- It is 5 years old module but it is still work in my website and in many other websites. A user friendly module should be running for so long time. A not user friendly module need an upgrade every month.
- it is stand alone module and end user dont need further doing after install. eg: for re-captcha you should register in the website and get an API. same you should do for the very new and recent top news module like IP LOG 1.01 (look at the news comment to see)

As i said above the article module is 5 years old and now "publisher" by Trabis and "fmcontent" by Voltan has more features than Article.

IMO phppp and Trabis are one of the very few coders and developers of Xoops that know well what an end user needs. Most of the current coders just strugling with codes without pay attention to end users needs.

Anyway, i dont think any feature in Article need to be added in the core content module. all features are covered by "publisher" and "fmcontent"

As i said before we just need a content module that can be:
1- clonable
2- stable
3- SEO
4- manage files, pics, content in different tables.

And i think publisher can be added but has some minor issues and because the great Trabis is absent now we can not debug them.
So IMO somebody should get him back or beg him back!

Irmtfan, you are right, that's only my look on an Article module, based on my practice. I tryed adopt it to my site, prepare local lang etc. After 4 years experiences my opinion is: there was great number of good ideas inside the module, but... too complicated for end user (not for me, but for users and simple moderators). ;)

Quote:
I agree with you - the sudden switches from Admin view to CPanel on the user site were too confusing as it was lacking lacking consistency. The best feature for me was the option to assign articles to more than one category. That was very good!

Well, if we get group of people willing to work on the "unified" content module, the best ideas from the various modules could be included.

Quote:
My new admins have not any problem with this. It is just an interface change and we are all familiar with it because in news also you have to edit in the user side theme.
IMO These can not confuse simple webmasters and i didnt see any related post in xoops.org forum at that time.

Anyway, i like to repeat that core content module should be full-featured and could manage all kind of contents like dynamic and static pages, pictures (gallery), files (download). even it can be a real time player for flv and mp4 files (Voltan said fmcontent can do it)

We need that all-purpose content module in the core. Then we can simply send all old related modules (eg: article, news 1.67, xcgal, extgal, wfdownloads, ...) to the dead area unless there are some volunteer developers will be found for them.

Quote:
I was hoping that the "news" module he forked from fmContent would do it, but I don't see much development lately. I hope, Voltan will be back, and as first, he will make it "clonable" similar to how Publisher does it.

Then all of us can focus on this module and work together on improving it.

Any news on the development of the module?

Mamba has emailed me his version of article (phppp module) using 2.5 gui, I have still to test it, but in my oppinion basing any new news module on article can only be a positiive thing.

having read the posts above I will agree that the switching from admin to user side when doing category/article management is confusing and should be confined to admin side, article module also lets you post articles via user side which is good and should be retained, for example I have inexperiences staff who can post articles so not letting them near admin side is a good thing.

I think also that any work on this module should be clearly defined as a news or blog module and not a content module, when I think content, I think static content like creating pages that are not going to change very often, news or blog module should be seperate from a content module. A news module should solely be for articles, content module should be a seperate entiity dealing with more static pages.

Quote:
Maybe yes, maybe not.

1. I agree, that for simple web sites this is the best way. Content module for creating a structure of static information or for almanach, news for dynamic content.
2. In large web pages with complicated structure I feel that a large content module with a possibility to use it both for static content and news would be better for me. Why?
a) because then I will have a possibility to define, which categories/topics are sorted like static content, and which are a news.
b) there will be a possibility to create a structure of main topics (eg. sport activities) with main info (definition, current national management of this discipline, info about registration etc.) and dynamic info (news)- in one place I have possibility to find anythig about eg. equestrian. Each of main topics and sub-topics could have an option to decide, what is it's status (news, content, single pages without of showing a topic in menu), any topic/category should have an option to show it in menu or not, what is a sort order ect.

That is becouse people (me to) have a different methods od finding an information. First group is checking only a news on main page (in FaceBook age it's very popular0, the second one is looking on the main page of web service and on the news from their best category (then they are trying to read all news from the category, but wants to have a possibility to find quickly related articles/pages in static content - eg. in local menu), the last group is trying to know sth. about a... sth being in web service, then they should have all content available in a 3 clicks.

I remember, in Mambo or Joomla (it was a time ago) I saw a content module with that options. On a main page of web site there was only an articles from news categories, in special blocks articles from any defined categories, and in any parts of web serwice other articles from different categories. For any category there was a possibility to define, it would be visible in some kind of menu or not.

Generally, it will be much more easier to organize a very complicated structure of content by the multidomain, but... strong content module is an option too.

Sorry for my bad english - I'm after 14 hours at work so I haven't a power to find any mistakes and bugs.