Superdesk: broken online workflow
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Szabolcs TothSzabolcs Toth
    Posts: 1Member
    Dear Superdesk Team,

    First of all, congratulations on Superdesk. Your CMS seems very promising and the concepts behind it looks really solid.

    However, there is one thing among these concepts that is a bit perplexing for me.

    Namely, the online editorial process.

    In your demo version we have managed to install there are three content types: texts, photos and packages. I understand this is very clear-cut for wire and print publication, but for online articles it misses some basic features. If I understand, right now Superdesk can forward packages to the web publisher modul and editors, in a separate process, are expected to revisit online articles (in let's say Drupal or Wordpress) to be able to insert multimedia content (e.g. insert the photos or insert other types of content in the text.)

    Problems with this approach:

    • a. It breaks online editorial workflow. I think it would be a basic requirement for an all-around CMS to make it possible for the online journalist to handle these types of content right in the CMS (when writing or editing an article), and fire and forget when they publish the content.
    • b. Syncing articles in Superdesk with aritcles in Drupal or Wordpress  front-ends (like when correcting the text later) seems difficult when these articles are fundamentally changed because of inserted content outside Superdesk).

    Your final version might take a different approach, I have no information on that, but what I can see now prompts me to ask these questions:

    1. Are you planning features to enable editors and journalists to insert photos, video, twitter posts etc. right into text-type articles?
    2. If it would not conform to your content model, are there any plans to reformat packages in a way that journalists or editors would be able to tell Superdesk (for instance using placeholders) where exactly the packaged content would appear online in the text?
    3. I can see photo content type items, but are there any plans to enhance these types with video and audio content types as well?

    Thank you for reading,

    Szabolcs Toth

    Post edited by Szabolcs Toth at 2016-02-25 07:28:07
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