FWN/FIWorkFlow

Fedora Insight Workflow for Fedora Weekly News: Overview

Zikula currently has a News module but we would like to implement PageMaster, which will generate a lot of the code needed to develop and implement a publications workflow.

Dale Bewley has documented some of our initial discussions and thoughts.

Based on this, let's iterate over the proposed workflow:

Define beat writer and editor roles in Zikula

• Zikula will be integrated with FAS, so the base level authorization will be as writers;
• editors and site admin roles can promote writers to editors;

• beat writers should be able to:

• open a new article and mark up appropriately with an integrated WYSIWYG editor (using xinhua)
• apply appropriate categories for their beat, to associate it both with a specific FWN issue (for aggregation), as well as to flag it with their beat (also for aggregation)
• submit their article unpublished for editorial review

• editors should be able to:

• see a 'to do' list of the unpublished submitted articles in their categories, and be able to edit these
• publish the edited articles for publication onto Fedora Insight

Define publications types

Fedora Insight will have the following publication types

• Fedora Weekly News
• interviews
• podcasts
• Fedora TV episodes

Defining Categories and Tags controlled list for content

Each current beat should have its own category in Zikula. These manifest as values in the "Beat" publication field of the "Fedora Weekly News" publication type.

• Ambassadors
• Announcements
• Design
• Fedora Planet
• KDE
• Marketing
• Quality Assurance
• Security Advisories
• Translation
• Virtualization

Workflow for submitting news items

Beat writers write up their beats as one posting in 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Beat writers would complete their beats and leave these as unpublished for the editors to check over and then publish.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. Separating these into categories also allows subscribers some more granularity in subscribing at the beat level within FWN with the RSS functionality, should they wish.

Currently, the create publication link is only available in the Admin panel. We will need to add this to a logged-in user's sidepanel

Editing Articles

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,

Publishing Articles

An FWN Editor will mark all articles as "published" after final editing, and this will make them viewable on the FI site.

Vanilla E-mail Version

The final step is a plain ascii version of the content suitable for mailing out to fedora-news-list and fedora-announce-list. Probably the easiest way to do this is to pull the individual RSS articles together and transform into a printable version.