In the Virtual Newsroom that we are making at MSU, we are going to start having participants create a person node for each source they talk with for a given story (even if that person is not quoted) and associate sources with stories in which they are used. In terms of OpenPublish architecture over time, should I use Author for this? Should I make a master Person node type myself? Is there a better way to deal with this that I am not considering?
Our goal is to start, in a person's profile, to accrue both publication information and sourcing use, to build up a profile for commonly used sources. Eventually we want to enable people used as sources to login, associate themselves with their source node (probably with some verification process), and track where they are being quoted, to make verification easier. It will also let us start to use sources as content, and so let people vote on veracity of sources over time, so sources start to have different measures of trust associated with them.
In OpenPublish, I was hoping that instead of making the person node "author", it would be "person", so it could fill other roles one might have in the system, and so I could have one unified person node that is not the user, and so then I could extend the author page to also include things like "places I've been quoted." In terms of OpenPublish architecture over time, should I use Author for this? Should I make a master Person node type myself? Is there a better way to deal with this that I am not considering?
The move to having a node-type for people is good, but I think it has more generalized applications that would make it smart to just make it a People node type (and if you want to keep track, then have a multi-valued attribute that lets you specify if a person is an author, source, etc., or just look for different types of content to see if a person has articles, or has been quoted or sourced).
Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Jonathan
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I haven't really thought this
I haven't really thought this through too much, but my initial thought is to clone the Author type and name it something like Source. I definitely wouldn't mix in authors and sources together in the same content type, unless I renamed it something else and added a field to denote which was which. Note that when you create articles, you have an author field which is based on the content type Author. If your sources are in this table as well, they will be in the lookup when they shouldn't be.
Also note that your sources won't be able to login with this setup. In order to login they need a Drupal username and password. This is only creating a node, which is only simulating a user account. Even if the sources enter the site later and create their own Drupal account, it won't be tied in any way to their source node (yet).
As for creating an inheritance structure for content types, this isn't yet possible. Hopefully this will feature will be implemented for Drupal 8. Here's the issue:
http://drupal.org/node/100925
in citizen journalism, person could be source & reporter
Hello,
Thanks for replying. In the kind of citizen journalism we are designing, a given user could be a source and an author at the same time, though maybe in different parts of the site, and we would want all people to show up in all people selectors. Then the page for a person becomes the place where you can see that person's articles and blogs, but also his or her articles on which they were sources, too.
With the Author node type and its relation to user, that is exactly the behavior we are looking for, too. Source can be created separate from a login so they don't HAVE to register but can start having a sourcing profile aggregated even though they aren't logged in, but then can be associated later should the person decide they want to take ownership of their "Person" by making a login and joining the site.
I was thinking of just adding a source area to the article that works just like the author area, but I am leery of customizing OP standard node types, for fear of making the update not work or having the extra data wiped out by an update. Do you have any experience in that kind of thing?
Thanks,
Jonathan