I'm working on a site for a community radio show that includes a set of brief news headlines in the right sidebar. The site is at http://blackmask.ca (apologies if you're using IE, i haven't bothered to make it look decent for your browser yet).
If you click one of the headlines, it takes you to a node whose content-type is "headlines". Each node contains several headlines. This means that right now to input headlines, you have to know to put "<a name..." tags in the body of the headlines so that the links inside the node works, and then put those links into another field in the content type. That field is displayed as the brief version you see on the right hand sidebar.
This way of doing it works okay for me, but the two other people who work on the show are very low-tech, and it will be too much for them. The other thing is that I'd like the ability to tag individual headlines, which is now not possible.
Is there some user-friendly foolproof way you can think of where we could input the headlines for a specific day as individual taggable nodes, and then have them aggregated together and published at the same time to the right sidebar? I'd still like to have all of the headlines for a specific day appear on a page together, with links into the body, but i'd like to automate that whole process. I found this module called "nodequeue" that seemed like it might be helpful, but after looking into it i'm not so sure. Any thoughts?
Thanks for your time,
Macho
Comments
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I don't see a question here?
yeah
for some reason it's getting cut off. when i go to the "edit" tab i see my full message, but in "view" it's cut off halfway through the second paragraph. any thoughts on that?
never mind
unterminated html tag, which i've now escaped.
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they headlines are linked to what?
seems to me if they are linked to actual content on the site, you should use views.module to create your lists and automatically link the node title "headline" to the node.
that is a possibility
but that means i have to create two new views every week, right? one for the sidebar headlines, one for the full text. seems like a lot of work. i think my non-tech-savvy co-hosts would have an easier time with the current setup than trying to show them how to create their own views.
and i'm not sure how i would get the individual headline titles in the sidebar to link to the appropriate spot inside the "full" view, which is something i'd really like, too. ideally, that process would be automated, but i'm not sure how it work at all using views.
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I don't believe that to be true. you could use a date argument and a date filter
not quite sure I understand this issue. The node title exposed in a view can be linked to most anything when setting up the field. personally, I'd link it to the node itself that the title is being pulled from so that those who click on the headline are taken to the story itself. Though that may not be what you are after.
The only way, outside of writing your own module, that I am aware of would be to use views to create lists of content where you are pulling 1 field and linking it to "something else:"
ah...
thanks. i think this makes sense. i'll try it out.
what i intend is to link to a node with all of the stories for that day, but to position the reader so that they're brought to the specific story they clicked on within that page.
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you'll have to investigate some of the other options in views with regards to linking. What you are asking for doesn't sound impossible. I know that there are other methods of linking that are able to be used in views.
sidebar
i think i know how to do the linking, actually, unless i'm mistaken. the thing i can't wrap my head around is how to generate the sidebar the way it appears now. i can make a view to generate a single day's headlines by passing in the date as an argument, as you're suggesting. but how can i build a block with the last four days' headlines, the way it is now. can i make a view of views? how do i specify "use the past four wednesdays as arguments to the view"? and when the headlines for the current week are built, how do i "push" them to the sidebar?
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you're going to want to either file a support request in the views issue queue or wait for someone else with more knowledge in the area you are using views.
Part of what you want may have to be done with some dynamic argument.
okay thanks for the help all
okay thanks for the help all the same. maybe i'll play around and see what i can come up with.
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When you add the "Node: Post date" filter, you'll be presented with a configuration screen where you can set a date offset (ie -4 days). I think that will do what you're looking for.
Solved
Okay, I finally came up with a way to do this. I created two content types, one for news items, and another to "hold" a week's worth of news items. The weekly news type just has a date field and a node reference field that allows for an unlimited number of news nodes to be referenced by title.
Then I created two views. One was of the last four news days (Block) for the sidebar. I just picked the last 4 weekly news nodes, and chose to display the node reference field. Then I had to override the the node reference field theme and do some php work to get it to display exactly as I wanted.
The other view was the full view for a specific news day (Page). I basically did the same thing as for the other view, only added an argument for the day, and wrote different php, and the limit is 1 item instead of 4.
Hope that helps anyone else if they came up against some similar problem.