TIDEngine News/Blog Manager

[yojoe]

I did a short test on fresh GS instance with latest TE 1.5 on apache 2 with php 5.2.16
Installation went fine w/o errors.
After adding a new page and setting it as a "Master News Page" I've added

Code:

<?php tide_show_news(return_page_slug()); ?>

below

Code:

<?php get_page_content(); ?>

in innovation template, and a freshly added news popped up.

But...t !

1.
The news refuse to work when they are displayed on page named "news" with fancy urls enabled .
Next thing is that the url structure looked terribly.
Example news "first entry" on page "announcements" had an URI like:
domain/page-announcements-news-first-entry

Hopefully I was able to fix it, and get a nice /page/newsURI link structure.
I hope you will consider adding this to your plugin, and tweak rest of things, as this goes for pages only:
.htaccess:

Code:

#Rule for pages
RewriteRule ^/?([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)/([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)/?$ ^index.php?id=$1&tide_show_news&current_news=$2 [L]

tide_news_helper.php line 347

Code:

$url = SITE_URL . $page .'/'. $news;

I'd even suggest to let the user choose if he want to get /pages/$page/$news, because I'm not sure if this fix won't interfere with other plugins or custom link structure
Thus a checbkox could enable/disable adding a /content in URI

Code:

RewriteRule ^content/?([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)/?([A-Za-z0-9_-]+)/?$ ^index.php?id=$1&tide_show_news&current_news=$2 [L]

$url = SITE_URL . 'content/' . $page .'/'. $news;

Mine solution fixes also displaying news on page named "news".
And - what I wanted to point next - fixed problems with dates, as they were not being shown.


btw. after I renamed the page, to which I already added couple news, they disappeared in news management panel. I had to manually change the name of the directory in which files were saved, and - I don't remember if I had to - but open resave the news again.

2.
I also wanted to grab a list of news from their proper page and show in a box on homepage.
Calling <?php tide_news_menu('news'); ?> works perfect, but it offers only basic behaviour of listing news from all or certain page. Is it already possible to invoke the function with parameters to format outputted data in the way I like ?
For example showing in a box last 3 entries, formatted in the way: header, date, excerpt, read more, and a link to the page with all newses at the bottom ?
And as it goes about excerpt it could offer couple formatting options like: amount of chars and/or paragraphs or be cut by a "page break" button available in ckeditor. But it might not be that simple, as there's already a news summary, for news list on proper page.
Maybe using twice the page break would be possible ?

3. templates

I've noticed there's a templates directory with .tpl files.
I assume those are views of all components used in tidenews.
Would it be possible to implement an option to create (manually) additional views, and assign them for specific page ?
This could resolve the question I asked in earlier point.

I'd also appreciate an option to create categories and assign them to slugs, as it could simplify the workflow.
It goes like: add news -> choose category -> save
This way if a slug name/url changes, news related to it could be easily maintained (look at point 1).

4. hooks to other plugins
I've noticed that non of most popular plugins doesn't work with tidengine.
It would be great if news plugin allowed to use i18n gallery, and search (this one has an api).


Considering most of above points, this would be a base to allow multilingual, dynamic articles.
It surely needs some tweaks for a custom url structure along with rewriting links.

5.
the design part
Since news summary isn't stripped from html tags, it allows adding thumbnails.
That's nice.
But the default look of news list is horrible. Like the link structure
This website explains one thing: http://comicsanscriminal.com/

Default tpl should be as transparent as possible. Thus all the content should be shown almost as plain text.
No backgrounds, no rounded corners, no custom fonts and so on.
This way the plugin should inherit styles from currently used GS theme.
The more, allowing to enable/disable things like date/ read more, make the header clickable or not.
But those are fluff and aren't that important.


K, that's all for now.
It's fantastic that more news/blog plugins started to appear !




edit: two more things
Automatically created URI's lack transliteration of special chars, thus an URI contains a weird "words".
This shouldn't be a big problem to implement, as GS handles this thing nicely.

And about creating categories. Binding them to pages, and then choosing categories from dropdown list during news creation, would be fantastic. If a website has >30 pages, choosing the right one from dropdown might be challenging