Organizing and Scheduling Content
I maintain a Drupal newspaper website and we're looking to improve the process for soliciting and publishing articles. The goals are to consolidate the process and make things more efficient for editors and authors to collaborate, as well as to provide some organizational tools to map out when articles will be published over the coming weeks or month.
Currently, the process is something like this:
- An editor has an idea for an article.
- Editor emails calls around to different authors to see if they can write it.
- Author picks up the story, writes article, and emails it to editor.
- Sometimes, there is some back and forth between editor and author over details. Multiple emails.
- Editor approves article and emails to copy editor.
- Copy editor finishes copy editing, and emails to webmaster.
- Webmaster posts to website.
There is a lot of wasted time in this process. Also, there is no central location where these transactions are taking place, so now way to easily track the current state of an article. And, there is no way to see a list of all upcoming stories with their deadlines. What I would like to see instead is:
- Editor and staff have access to a restricted area on the Drupal site. This area shows the current state of all unpublished articles (i.e. waiting to be assigned; assigned to 'username'; draft ready for review; ready for copy edit; ready to publish).
- Editor posts story idea with varying level of detail (i.e. how many words, deadline, what must be included, what the angle is, etc)
- E-mail is automatically sent out to all staff (users with role "staff") with link to story idea.
- Interested author can click on the link and take responsibility for the story.
- Author can add article as a draft to the Drupal website. Editor is notified via e-mail that draft is available.
- Editor approves article and marks as "ready to copy edit". Copy editor is notified via e-mail.
- Copy editor finishes copy editing, and marks the article as "ready to publish"
- Webmaster posts to website.
I know some of these steps (5-8) can be accomplished via the Workflow module. Does anyone have thoughts on how to implement steps 1-4? Or do folks have other ideas on a better process for this?
Getting from idea to article
For steps 1-4, what if you add a new CCK field to your articles called something like "proposal" and save the article as a draft and assign it to a user like "unassigned"? You could also add a group of fields in a fieldset and break out the wordcount, deadline, what must be included, and the angle.
Using the Rules module, you can create a rule that sends an email to all staff when an article is saved as draft for the first time, contains the "proposal" field/fieldset, and is assigned to "unassigned." If you want to only have specific staff receive the email based on the article type, you may want to assign a taxonomy term to the article and then have a different staff role receive article proposal notifications depending on the taxonomy term assigned.
You could also use Views generate a list of articles that anyone in your "staff" role can access. If your editors want to order the proposed articles by importance, you could use something like Nodequeue so that there is an order of article ideas. You could also use Views Bulk Operations to easily administer the list.
a modest proposal
Workflow states: proposed, accepted, draft, approved, published.
Add an outline and a "user working on it" field to the article. Editors may create articles which must have an outline - may set the "user working on it" field.
It is straightforward to restrict access to a view by role. Some users can view all articles in proposed state. Users can accept an article - a somewhat clumsy but simple way is a user edits the article and when he saves a rule fires which moves it into a acepted state and sets the "working on it" to his id. Nice to have an accept button on the list of proposed articles - fairly sophisticated theming.
Editors can see articles proposed, accepted, in draft state, approved - straightforward with views.
The writer can see proposed articles and his work queue - articles he has accepted. He moves the article to draft and the editors can approve or move it back to accepted.
Part of the approval (change workflow state to approved) process could be to set the "planed publish date". It would be simple to create a view to display approved articles by date.
It is straightforward to add all sorts of functionality like date accepted (how long has Bob been working on this?), trigger a word count when the article is approved so that the size shows up along with the date for planning, ...
thanks!
Thanks for the ideas, that is very helpful. I will try to put something together by the end of the year and write something up about it when I figure it out.
--
Twitter: dh_kosta
Use an integrated intranet - Alfresco?
We are in the process of moving our online publishing to Drupal and I was thinking of using Alfresco with Drupal's CMIS module. This way Drupal would be used as the intranet's presentation but we could use Alfresco's workflow management and what not.
I do not know enough about Alfresco, but it seems like a good idea to use an ECM/intranet solution to manage the process and it seems that Alfresco and Drupal are ready to rock:
http://drupal.org/project/cmis_alfresco
http://drupal.org/project/cmis
http://drupal.org/project/alfresco
http://www.alfresco.com/
Acquia even recently had a webinar on Alfresco and Drupal but the archive is not yet posted... Im sure it will be soon: http://acquia.com/community/resources/recorded_webinars
This solution is obviously a bit different than smalltalkman's but if your organization needs more than the workflow, maybe this is the best way?
Just started following this
Just started following this thread after seeing "Alfresco". I agree that using Alfresco in this case would be a great idea. In Alfresco, you can set up all of the work flow that you mentioned above really easily. However, the biggest advantage that i see in you guys using Alfresco is that you will be able to have your writers create an article in MS Word, save it to the Alfresco repository(Alfresco integrates with MS Word). Once the article is loaded to the repository, you can set up content rules to have the article go through the work flow process you mentioned with all of the email notifications. Once the article has been finally approved, you can transform the article to HTML (Alfresco has a file transformer). After that, the article can be added as a node to the Drupal front end and pushed live.
http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=352&p=1334&hilit=trans... (some info on transforming MS Word to html)
All of those CMIS modules that dutler mentioned earlier works pretty well, we just used it for another project that we blogged about here: http://www.appnovation.com/forces-alfresco-and-drupal-combined.
Arnold
www.appnovation.com