The Return of Drupal Tuesdays

James Robertson

It's been two whole weeks since the last Drupal Tuesday, but it feels like much longer.  I'll try to do better!

This week we're talking about how we manage the editions of the Observer, as per Russ' suggestion.  I'll admit, I slipped up in my archiving duties this week, and Russ lovingly pointed it out.  But, in my defense, there's a reason.

Observer v.1.0 was based on the Innovation News installation profile of Drupal, put out by the Open Publishing Lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology.  Basically, it was a package of Drupal that included modules, themes, and other bits to easily make a Drupal site into a newspaper site.

Included with this profile was the Edition Manager module, which is very clunky to use for constantly updating works.  It works best if you have a fixed number of editions.  You have to set the number of editions in one menu, set which things can be put into editions in another menu, set how editions are displayed in another menu, then organize stories into an edition in yet another menu.  Like I said, clunky.  The good thing about this module is that because certain types of content are filtered out, you can organize just the stuff you want into editions. 

While working on the website for the Journal of International Service, I came across a better, but still imperfect, way: the E-Publish module.  This module allows different publications within a website, and each of those publications are organized into edtions.  Each edition can have a volume and issue number as well.  All of this functionality is contained within one menu, making it easy to get to all the functions of the module.  Also, it adds links to the bottom of each story to the previous and next stories in the edition for easy reading, and makes one of the issues a current issue so you see only that edition's content.  However, there are few useful filtering options for organizing all the different kinds of content, so it's like drinking from a fire hose to go back to all the previous content and organize it into editions.

Both modules allow for archiving, but since I haven't organized the old material into editions yet using E-publish, we're still using the Edition Manager module for the archives.  Sometimes I don't remember to organize the new content into one (or either) system, and that is why there was a lapse in the archives for a while.  So, my apologies again.

What I would like to see is a module that combines the best of both worlds.  If only there was a way to add better filtering functionality to the E-publish module, I think that would be optimal.  Also, if there was a way to organize content into editions automatically when the content is submitted, it wouldn't require someone on the backend to do it every time.

Wait, I think I just found it. Oh the wonders of the Drupal community!

Thanks for tuning into Drupal Tuesdays this week.  Now to install that module....

 Cross posted to JamesGRobertson.com.