Any other news article / archiving other than Ditto?

I’ve set up a news feed system in Ditto where a front news page grabs the first x characters from a group of individual news item pages, however the client has now decided that Ditto isn’t up to the task because the content managers will find changing the articles too difficult, i.e they don’t even want to have to change the document IDs that the front page points to when a new article needs to be published etc.

Is there an easy way to keep the same document ID for the backend page, but just archive off the content with a single click / operation whenever required, and replace with new content?

So the old content gets sent to an archive page that gets auto-generated.

If this isn’t possible, are there any other news article / publishing snippets available in MODx that can do the same sort of job? Isn’t News Manager a precursor to Ditto and therefore not really suitable / workable?

They need something that’s so easy to use they barely need to pay any attention to it basically! A tall ask as all CMS software surely requires some ability and effort to learn, but this is what the client wants...

How is it decided which news items are displayed on the news front page?

Does it display the latest x number of news items or is the list dependent on some other factor?

If you are displaying the latest news items, you just need to order the documents in Ditto by published or created date. The latest item will be added to the front page and the oldest item will drop off.

Otherwise, you could set up two news containers, Current news and Archive news. Ditto would only grab documents from the Current news container for the front page. Content managers only add items to the Current news container and can move items to the archive container whenever they want to using the Document parent setting under the General tab.

There are six different content areas, each of which pulls the first x characters from a different article resource as "teaser text" and image.

I think they want content managers to not even have to move any items / resources, which makes things pretty difficult...

Also with this proposed set up, whenever new items are created in the Current News section, they’ll presumably have different IDs so the content managers would need to edit the &documentID setting on the front news page and point it to the new document ID.

Which shouldn’t be a big deal I know, but apparently it is!

If you use the &parents parameter in Ditto, you don’t need to change anything on the front page. Ditto will always be pointing to the correct location. In my suggestion, let’s say you have a menu tree like this with one current area and your 6 content areas:

• Current news (9)
• Content area 1 (10)
• Content area 2 (11)
• Content area 3 (12)
• Content area 4 (13)
• Content area 5 (14)
• Content area 6 (15)

Content managers would add documents to the Current news container and your Ditto call would point there:

Only documents in the Current news container would be pulled into the news front page. When they need to archived, they can be moved to the appropriate content area. It only takes 2 clicks to move a document to a different parent.

Alternatively, instead of using a Current news container, you could use a checkbox TV to indicate whether an item should be promoted to the front page. Then the content managers only need to toggle the checkboxes, no moving required. Your Ditto call would then point to all the relevant containers using the parents parameter: