My Articles experience so far

I never thought I'd be writing this again "My Articles experience so far". In my previous life, qualifying as an accountant, I had to serve Articles for 4 years, which is basically an apprenticeship on low pay. Yet here I am again but this time it's a more pleasing experience.

Installation

Get a few errors on install - see attached. These seem to be due to the sub packages required. Everything seems to run ok though but the red errors are disconcerting.

To Tree or not to Tree

The Articles are resources but you can't access them through the resource tree. I don't know if I like this or not and whether it will confuse clients, in that for some types of page you can drill down whereas others they get managed from within the parent. Is Articles opening up a UI Pandora's box that we might regret?

Comment numbers

After posting some test comments the articles pages that display the number of comments(0) doesn't get updated until the cache is refreshed

Comment permissions

After posting comments the admin user didn't have permission to view/edit comments. I did a delete and re-install of everything and this is ok now

Mind your Language

I was intrigued by items such as %articles.read_more within the chunks. I looks under System Lexicon Management expecting to find %articles.read_more but it wasn't there. Am I misunderstanding his?

Twittering

The main reason for looking into articles is to autotweet. A client wants to tweet their news stories. I'm thinking of using articles and switch off comments, so they look like regular news stories.

I've been unsuccessful in tweeting though, as have others - see https://forums.modx.com/thread/73060/article-twitter#dis-post-407828

I have not used Articles yet, but I thought I'd comment on these:

Comment permissions
After posting comments the admin user didn't have permission to view/edit comments. I did a delete and re-install of everything and this is ok now

I think flushing permissions and settings on the Security menu would have solved this.

Mind your Language
I was intrigued by items such as %articles.read_more within the chunks. I looks under System Lexicon Management expecting to find %articles.read_more but it wasn't there. Am I misunderstanding his?

Is it possible that you were looking under the core namespace? There's probably an "articles" namespace (possibly with more than one topic) and that's where these would be. Also, people often don't notice that there are multiple pages of lexicon entries.


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PLEASE, PLEASE specify the version of MODX you are using . . . PLEASE!
MODx info for everyone: http://bobsguides.com/MODx.html

Hi Bob - re point 2 I was definitely looking under yhe Articles namespace.

Sorry, I was thinking of the old way. Now, the lexicon entries are in the files (core/components/ComponentName/lexicon/en for English). The componentName is also the namespace and the first part of the filename in the en directory is the topic.

So, for core/components/articles/lexicon/en/default.inc.php, the namespace is "articles" and "default" is the topic.

And graydesign is absolutely right that the way to override them is to create a new entry in the Lexicon Management grid in that namespace and topic with the same key and a new value. The file may be overwritten when you upgrade the component, but the lexicon entry will survive any upgrade.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PLEASE, PLEASE specify the version of MODX you are using . . . PLEASE!
MODx info for everyone: http://bobsguides.com/MODx.html

Quote from: sparkyhd at Jan 18, 2012, 11:45 AM

To Tree or not to Tree

The Articles are resources but you can't access them through the resource tree. I don't know if I like this or not and whether it will confuse clients, in that for some types of page you can drill down whereas others they get managed from within the parent. Is Articles opening up a UI Pandora's box that we might regret?
]

I totally agree with you. That's exactly the reason why I didn't understand how to get multiple articles in the blog. I don't find it consistent with the the MODx resources mechanism if you ask a MODx-rookie.

The reason they are not in a tree is due to the fact that you could have 10,000+ articles on a site. That does not fit into a tree UI.

Okay. If you have you have 1000 resources (no articles) will it fit in the tree?

It's already slow enough even with few articles.

PS. They are in a tree, just hidden. [ed. note: khyrlik last edited this post 14 years, 6 months ago.]

At first I wasn't sure about Articles not showing up in the tree also, but it totally makes sense. Keeps your resource tree much more manageable.
The main things I think Articles currently lacks are:
- autoTag Input Type for tags (all tags listed below tags input, click to select)
- Email Templates for Quip (currently modifying email templates requires modifying plugin files)
- Multiple Article Container pages (more below)
- option to display Template for each Article name in Articles Grid when editing Article Containers
- Twittering, ya this is broken for me too. Would be awesome if it worked
- Global Tags (more below)

Ok so this Multiple Article Containers idea is a big idea and considering you can achieve most of this manually with getResources and other addons for pagination, maybe it's not necessary. WIth that said, I think it would be awesome if you could have an Article Container like template, with the shortcode for comments, paging, latestposts, tags but that pulled from multiple Article Containers instead of just one.

It seems that Articles only supports tags within each Article Container (i hope I'm wrong). I've needed a way to support global Tags and Categories. I describe how I accomplished that here:
http://j4p.us/180i1z0o0G07

At first I wasn't sure about Articles not showing up in the tree also, but it totally makes sense.

Absolutely agree. Articles should not be in the Tree. Children that are not Articles, should show up, however.

Ok so this Multiple Article Containers idea is a big idea and considering you can achieve most of this manually with getResources and other addons for pagination, maybe it's not necessary.

I disagree entirely. Its very necessary. My site has over 15 Articles Containers (most are nested in other Article Containers) and grows with each user, project or development team that is created (moreover, it is all done on demand). It works extremely well, once you get the initial setup. You could achieve it with getResources, your own scripts, etc. But you could also write an entire 500 page novel bit for bit in assembler.

Articles already supports multiple Containers. It even supports nesting them, it just doesn't tell you that it does. In order to fix it, I spent about 3 hours searching the code, database, etc. All in all, after adjusting Articles on my site, it takes 5 lines of code to allow all of that functionality without losing any of the benefits that Articles gives anyway. Just my opinion, as my needs are vastly different from everyone else's.

It seems that Articles only supports tags within each Article Container

Actually, Tags use tagLister, so it has all of the support tagLister has. You can either a) adjust the call to use a different parent or depth, b) make your own tagLister call, or c) Nest Containers for an even better distribution of statistics (Articles supports nesting, it just doesn't tell you it supports it).

...modifying [Quip] email templates requires modifying plugin files...

You can do this by modifying the lexicon options. They are in Lexicon -> quip -> emails. No adjustment to plugin files at all.

Multiple Article Container pages

Supports this, see above. Additional modification may be required for expected and desired behavior. I think this depends on what you want it to do with Multiple Containers.