Posted by jasonmce on November 11, 2010 at 9:07pm
I'm working at a news site where they'd often like to be able to re-order the articles on the front page, say swapping the 3rd and 4th teaser blocks.
Is there an easy way to reorganize the articles on the front page beyond setting "sticky"?
--Jason
Comments
This may not be exactly what
This may not be exactly what you're looking for, but I use Nodequeue and Nodequeue randomizer.
Nodequeue allows me to place the stories I want displayed in a queue and nodequeue randomizer allows me to randomize them at intervals with weights.
I subscribe the doubt
The idea of ordering the homepage articles of a big newspaper using publishing Date is really poor. A tipical newspaper has a few breaking news always in top that throughout the day are reordered down in the homepage, my experience is that the editorial team of a news paper needs to control totally the order of the news in the home page.
The idea of the Observer, create a CCK Node with references to the articles, http://drupal.org/nyobserver, is pretty simple, and works, but when you have a newspaper with lots of sections and subsections, creating manually this "Channel Pages" and ordering the HomePage and the "Channel Pages" produces so much work to the editorial team. What we use in a project that uses a custom CMS is to have an unique order of news an use it in all the sections and homepages. I figure that as "Signal says" Nodequeue could be the solution, but it could be nice if someone at phase2 tell us how they do that in complex projects like http://www.tnr.com or http://www.thenation.com/, cause i suppose that they are using something different.
Though labor intensive, I think nodequeue is the way to go
My initial thought was the same as Signal, create a node queue that editors could "publish to" (instead of front page).
I set up the node queue, created a view/block for it, and updated the front page contexts to use my node queue blocks instead of Homepage Featured Article and Homepage Articles.
David.gil is correct that it takes a lot of editor hand-waving. We're talking about getting some feeds, which is just going to make things more labor intensive on that side.
The upside is that we can have a node queue for each "section" so the editors can really get in there and tweak things around. They seem willing to go through a little hardship if they can hand-tune each section.
For now it's working out fine, if I come up with a better solution I'll be sure to post it here.
--Jason
I've got another solution
I've got another solution that might help someone out.
Here was my problem. Our organization creates news articles, and in addition we also display articles from NPR. What we wanted is to mix in our own articles with NPR's articles on our homepage, much like wbur.org. We also wanted to display prominent news stories that had images, and we didn't want any duplication of articles in the various views. Putting all of this together was too much for Views to handle by itself.
My solution was to use nodequeues and fill them programmatically. I implemented hook_form_alter() so that when an article is created it runs a function that re-creates the nodequeue based on some rules I programmed. This is nice because it makes my homepage basically 100% automated (although if we want to feature certain articles that's easy) and I can make the rules for which articles to display complex, since I'm using a programming language to select them as opposed to one SQL query built with Views. Much more flexible.