User:Dale/Zikula FWN Testing

Below is a scratchpad for a proposed workflow for producing FWN in Zikula.

Background Information

FWN will use the News Pagemaster module to compose beats and aggregate them into issues.

• Current workflow
• Fedora Insight AKA Zikula workflow - under construction

Classification

• What is the scope of a category?
• What is the scope of a tag?
• How do we decide when to use a tag and when to use a category?
• How does the scrope of a module's (Pagemaster) object (Publication Field) relate to the scope of a site-wide module or function like RSS publication?

Beats

Wrong Module
We are currently exploring Pagemaster, so any references below to News module and it's attributes are misleading.

• A weekly beat is composed as single post by a beat writer.

Is one post granular enough?

Would it be interesting if any CMS user could contribute an article to a beat just by categorizing or tagging it?

• Beats are submitted with the News module publishing attribute set to "Unpublished".

• Each beat will be identified by a "category" within the Zikula News module.

Are these categories only within the News module?

Who uses the News module? Everyone I hope.

Presumably beat categories(?) like 'Virtualization' could be used by any CMS user.

• Beats will be associated with a particular FWN issue by a "tag".

We need a generic tag that doesn't require the beat writer to remember, "OK

the next FWN is #201"...

1) beat writers write up their beats as one posting in Zikula/Fedora
Insight, and assign it the appropriate news category that is equivalent
to the beat they are writing.  I added all of the current active beats
to this as categories within the "news" module in Zikula on publictest6.
  Beat writers would complete their beats and leave these as unpublished
for the editors to check over and then publish.  This is a simple option
in Zikula's editing and posting options when you are editing an item.
Seperating these into categories also allows subscribers some more
granularity in subscribing at the beat level within FWN with the RSS
functionality, should they wish.
...
The beats will need to have the
particular FWN issue as an additional tag so that we can distinguish and
aggregate them.

Beat Editing

• WYSIWYG Editor

2) xinhua will provide functionality for embedding URL references, which
could be back to the wiki, external links, and perhaps even to the other
beats in a given issue.  There was some discussion on the news list back
in the late summer about challenges with doing linking with just the
vanilla Zikula, so Mel and I lobbied for an editor to be added sooner
rather than later to address this.  

Zikula Modules

While whiteboardign workflows, we have looked at the News module and are now looking at Pagemaster. Below some tests...

Pagemaster Module Configuration for FWN

This is just a test and a work in progress.

Publication Type

• Create a publication type: "Fedora Weekly News"

Select "Create a Publication Type"

Publication Field

• Create a publication field within that type: "Beat". Currently there are PHP warnings on this page.

Select "Create a Publication Field"

• Add list of beats to "Beat" field as a selection list. Apparently due to a missing JavaScript library the form for editing a field of type list is broken, and drawn off the left side of the screen. This is a known bug.

Error
Javascript livepipe package was not found or it's incomplete. It's required for the plugin configuration modalbox. Please download it and copy into your site.

News Module

We apparently aren't going to use the New module, but the Pagemaster module instead.

News Module Howto

• Login
• Click "Administration" in the top right corner.

Select "Administration"

• By default the "System" tab should now be highlighted.
• Click on the "Modules" icon.

Select "Modules"

• Scroll down to "News" and click on the word "News".

Select "News"

• Click on "Create a News Article"

Select "Create a News Article"

• Edit the article:

Select "Edit Beat"

• Title: "Virtualization Beat"
• PermaLink URL title: blank
• Category: Select the category which matches your beat.
• Lead page teaser: A summary for the beat?
• Content format type: Plain Text?
• Article body: This is the beat.

Wiki Beats had ==== Multiple Stories ==== how will be format the body to represent this? Is this a reason to post a beat in multiple postings rather than one?

• Content format type: Plain Text?
• Footnote: blank
• Publishing Options:

• Publish on news lead page: checked
• No time limit: checked
• Allow commenting for this article: checked

• Article attributes: what is this?
• Tags: FWN, ?
• Status: Pending Review
• Action: Publish

Publication

FWN Issue Composition

A FWN issue is a summary and a collection of beats.

• The editor will review beat posts and set their published attribute to "Published".
• Each FWN is a summary and a interpolation of all tagged articles??

vHow exactly does the editor aggregate the beats? If we stick to predefined categories (beats) plus a tag (issue), I imagine it would be simple to create a stanza to include all the right content, but can Zikula support that?

3) If beat writers can tag their beat post also with "Fedora Weekly
News" as a tag, then we could also aggregate the beats RSS-like, into a
complete issue, that readers could then subscribe to these and receive
them as RSS, as beats are approved.

Plain Text Email Issue Generation

4) for the e-mail FWN version, we'll use some XSLT or perhaps perl or
python scripting to transform the RSS into some plaintext.  This should
not be hard to do and we can find someone who should be able to create
this for us.  The goal for this version will be to make it look
basically like what we have for the e-mail version now.  Links will need
to point back to Zikula, as appropriate.

The FWN archive to issues should point to the specific aggregated FWN
issue back in Zikula/FI.  If all the RSS works properly, this should work.

Summary

So let's discuss the above workflow and yes, we can certainly add this
to the FWN wiki section and point to it from the Zikula and FI pages
there.  Am I way out on left field with what I'm proposing?  Thanks!