Project help

My friend Chris and I are planning to start a website which will have a lot of writers and atleast 24 posts in a week. He is a big fan of Wordpress and I am not. So, I started looking for different CMS and I came to ModX.

He is trying to figure out a way to do this funtion :

We want the main body area to be divided into 6 parts. 2 columns and 3 rows. We want to have different writers’ article appear in each area. Suppose we have six cells. The top left being 1 and bottom right being 6, we want the first writer to appear in cell 1. when writer 2 posts something we want writer 1 to go to cell 2 and writer 2 to go to cell 1 and like wise go till cell 6 and vanish after that. Is there a way that this functionality could be done using modx. The website we are working on is www.yahwehonline.com and Chris has already installed wordpress and not able to figure out how to do the functionality, so i was wondering if i could come up with something, we could totally move over to modx.

please help.

If you create an image mockup it would help us understand what you mean more clearly.

i dont know why it come up very well... anyway, the idea is to have the first writer’s post to go in the cell 1. Once writer 2 posts, writer 2 goes to cell 1 while writer 1 oes to cell 2. Once writer 3 posts, writer 1 goes to cell 3 and writer 2 goes to cell 2 and writer 3 in cell 1.

so i want this kind of functionality to happen with different writers posting everyday...

along with it, ther are a few others which i can hopefully figure out...

Hemmm...

I’m not quite understand it yet.

How about if the first writer post an article twice, before second writer? Will it behave the same as if it was written by three different writers?

From my opinion, will it be like news listing, which the front page will list all the newset articles added to the system? As for now, don’t think about the layout, but think of the functionality, will it be work like a news listing page, which the latest articles added is being put in the first column, and the sixth articles added will be put on the sicth column?

Maybe by answering this question it will help to clarify the problem a little bit.


Sincerely,
Wendy Novianto

That’s a newslisting application, definitely.

Would I be correct in assuming that you don’t want the same author showing up twice? For example you have:

Authors: 1-24

Authors 1-6 each write something and it shows up in the boxes (1 writes first so is "oldest"):

6 | 5
4 | 3
2 | 1

Author 7 writes something so it pushes them all down a spot (dropping author 1):

7 | 6
5 | 4
3 | 2

Then say author 5 writes something again. Would you want 5’s original article to fall out of the list, or to duplicate. In other words:

5b| 7
6 | 5a
5 | 3

OR

5b| 7
6 | 4
3 | 2

The first method is strict on first come first serve. The second method is basically, the most recent articles from the most recent unique authors. Which to me seems more relevant. Can newslisting do that?

Jared, newslisting doesn’t do that, currently. As soon as Mark sees this, I’m sure he’ll have a new mission...

But depending on how you have it set up (and I took it to mean there would be only 6 authors), you could set up 6 separate folders for each author, and have newslisting pull the most current article from each folder.

Since i have 24 authors, the chances of me getting the same author twice in the 6 consecutive articles is very slim.

7 | 6
5 | 4
3 | 2


if author 5 posts again

5b | 7
6 | 5a
4 | 3

this is basically what I want it do automatically when the posting is done...

I am guessing that this is a form of newslisting snippet but it moves into different cells rather than one below another.

Seems like that could be accomplished by fixing a width on each article and floating it left. That would give you the "cell" appearance without having to sort thru the list 6 times to pull the appropriate article. Just a thought.

Since he doesn’t care about duplicate authors and only wants the 6 most recent, your suggestion is right on Jared. Depending on the desired layout structure, some hacking may be needed (it outputs to DIVs, not table cells). If this is the case, I would suggest changing the name of the snippet to facilitate no overwriting on future upgrades!