[WebCom] News Items on new Drupal Site

[Jo Walsh]

dear Frank, all,

On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 03:36:04PM -0500, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Our new Drupal site is very exciting.  However, we no longer have news
> items appearing on the front page at all.

Right, so they're only visible now at the snappy location
http://www.osgeo.org/content/news/news_archive/news_archive.html

> suggestions on how we ought to handle news items on the new platform.
> I imagine there is some standard approach well suited to news flashes?

Hm. What i would do, having had a look, is limit the front page to one
'spotlight' and put, say 3 links for 'latest news' underneath the
introduction paragraph on the front page. Putting the most fastmoving 
content on the front page means we get indexed more regularly and
probably get a bit more index priority.

Drupal works internally on a system of 'blocks' - you have seen some of
that, FrankW. There should be a default 'block' which displays subject
lines for all nodes of type 'News'. It in turn should have
visible/nonvisible options, be positionable on the left, the right or
in the centre, have a 'weighting' describing how far it sinks down
the page, and a regex-like filter to match pages to show up on.
 
It would make sense in future to have a development site to experiment 
with - which could be open to more people than the main one. 

I would like to see a trac running for platform
enhancement/administrivia requests of all kinds, as soon as we can get
one set up - this will be a good abstraction for the mixture of paid
and volunteer help we eventually get to keep things running, having
one place for people to ask questions.

As mentioned in my previous privmail, the project i'm working on right
now is about to go cultlike ballistic and will likely absorb all my
screentime and energy for the next month at least, so that puts me
back in kibitzing-only mode here.

Partly for this reason it would be great to open up the news submission 
/ publishing process to more people (I am thinking all the PSC/
committee chairs should have this access right). Tyler, this is the
only response i've got to your question yesterday - that to keep the
authorisation structure as simple as possible, makes a lot of sense -
until complexity appears in the world we shouldnt need to plan for it
- but it could make sense to have a 'News Editor' role not exposing
the full permissions of the 'Project Manager' one you set up.

HTH, and sorry this isn't more. I guess it's been a long time since
there was a public IRC meeting to discuss the web presence, and
perhaps that would help build up an issue collection and gete through
the decisions faster. 

Yours, distracted but listening,


jo