Hi,

I just woke up on a Sunday morning, so please take the following
suggestion with a more than a few grains of salt.

I don't know if the article types are the place for it, but it may be
worth looking into: As we saw recently on the Campsite support list,
someone had a question about importing their content from another CMS.

There are two (maybe three) use case scenarios I have in mind:

- A new user who has no idea what can be done with article types and just
wants to get something up and running
- A user of another CMS who wants to switch to Campsite as painlessly as
possible
- A user of a hosted Campsite instance who wants to switch to their own
server

Ideally, what we'd be able to do is give users a few options that would
let them do a couple of things in the article type setup process:

- A preset, prebuilt article type structure sort of like Fast News

- An option to mimic the default article types from other CMSes (say,
Mambo/Joomla and Drupal), thereby setting the groundwork for a quicker,
easier import process. If I understand those CMSes correctly, they don't
really have a flexible article type structure in the first place, so
they're sitting ducks

- An option to save and switch your article types setup to a file. If I
understand it correctly, article types are at the publication level. If a
publication needs to leave one server and move to another one (for example
graduating from a hosted service like Media On Web to their own server),
this would help the process. Keeping the article types in a file would
also allow other developers to describe the default structures from more
CMSes, which eventually would allow more users to switch.

Ideally, then, the article types structure could be packed up with a
standard SQL backup to make a completely automated backup procedure, one
which would pack up article type configuration, all templates, the SQL
stuff and the images directory into one file.

I don't know about others, but for me, having no expressed linkage between
the article types and the templates is kind of a problem. Especially while
learning Campsite, I've created numerous article types only to never use
them. Currently, when you create article types, they're in a completely
separate place (usually at least five clicks away) from the templating
menu.

Maybe what would be nice then would be an option to display configured,
available article types in the templating process. I know that's mainly a
task for the templating menu, but if we build the article types handling
correctly, it will enable these things in the future.


doug








03/19/2006 07:47 AM
Please respond to campsite-dev


To:
cc:
Subject: RE: [campsite-dev] Article Type Sketches for v2.6


We have been waiting for this a long time. We couldn't use Arabic for the
article type fields' names because we can't implement them in the template
design (the parser doesn't understand them). This will enable us to create
more localized interfaces in Arabic.

Welcome aboard Peter Hartman


_______________________________
Raed Neshiewat
Director

TamamTech Inc.
PO Box: 20513
Amman, Jordan 11118
Tel: +962 6 461 7474
Fax: +962 6 463 0238
Email: raed@tamamtech.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Baranowski [mailto:paul@paulbaranowski.org]
Sent: Sunday, March 19, 2006 12:14 AM
To: campsite-dev@campware.org
Subject: [campsite-dev] Article Type Sketches for v2.6

We've recently brought on a new member to our development team: Peter
Hartman (he will be sending out a bio shortly), who has worked on
another big CMS prior to this called Caravel. His first starter project
will be fixing up the Article Types screens in order to implement some
often requested features:

Article Types:
- Ability to rename & translate them
- Ability to merge article types together
- Ability to hide article types no longer in use

Article Field Types:
- Ability to rename & translate them
- Ability to reorder them
- Ability to change a field's type
- Ability to hide fields that are no longer in use

Attached are the screenshots for these features, feedback is encouraged,
even if it is to say "looks good". Please let us know what you think!

The design for this feature is also on the developer wiki:
http://code.campware.org/projects/campsite/wiki/ArticleTypes26

- Paul

It would only show you a sample of which data has been mapped to which
fields, not really a "preview".

- Paul

Mugur Rus wrote:
> Question: how will you generate the article type preview in
> MergeArticleTypesPart2.jpg?
>
> Mugur
>
> */Paul Baranowski /* wrote:
>
> We've recently brought on a new member to our development team: Peter
> Hartman (he will be sending out a bio shortly), who has worked on
> another big CMS prior to this called Caravel. His first starter project
> will be fixing up the Article Types screens in order to implement some
> often requested features:
>
> Article Types:
> - Ability to rename & translate them
> - Ability to merge article types together
> - Ability to hide article types no longer in use
>
> Article Field Types:
> - Ability to rename & translate them
> - Ability to reorder them
> - Ability to change a field's type
> - Ability to hide fields that are no longer in use
>
> Attached ar! e the screenshots for these features, feedback is
> encouraged,
> even if it is to say "looks good". Please let us know what you think!
>
> The design for this feature is also on the developer wiki:
> http://code.campware.org/projects/campsite/wiki/ArticleTypes26
>
> - Paul
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Yahoo! Mail
> Use Photomail
>
> to share photos without annoying attachments.