Is there anything like 'Articles' for Evolution?

I'm trying to put together a website that is a blend of a forum (using phpBB3) and the ability for site members to publish articles. Looking at the (Splittingred) "Articles" screen captures is really intriguing. It looks like that author understands the difference between a blog (page that is a series of articles), from the idea of single articles (like an 'e-zine.) Some authors may only create one single article. They don't need a blog.

Revolution looks cool, but I do want fast performance and the Evolution code is optimized for it. But another big snag is that I really want to use the MODxBB "Extra" (only available for Evo) to form a bridge between the phpBB3 forum software - for all the member/logins/registrations stuff. The site just has to have a single log-in for both parts.

So, is there anything like "Articles" in Evolution? Maybe it's native to Evo code, maybe there is a blog "Extra" that could be used.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Dennis

What we did was use Ditto (for listings) + Jot (for comments).

Maybe there are some other packages I don't know of in the Extra's section: http://modx.com/extras/category/blogging (click the Evolution tab).

I'm still developing and supporting PubKit for Evo, and use it myself for generating and managing blogs, news items and events listings via straightfoward web-form input for routine items.

The package in the Extras includes an installer that will generate a sample sub-tree that you can cherry-pick for Ditto calls, template chunks etc.

Next version will include true previews (see what an update is like without saving to the live copy), and possibly the message class I use to create contact forms and guestbooks.

:-} KP

NB if you search the Extras, you'll perhaps come across an earlier version called pkBlog. The links to it don't work, because I dorked up the process of marking it as "deprecated".

Quote from: nomark at Nov 13, 2012, 03:22 AM

What we did was use Ditto (for listings) + Jot (for comments).

Maybe there are some other packages I don't know of in the Extra's section: http://modx.com/extras/category/blogging (click the Evolution tab).

Thanks for the reply GP Seitzema,

Looking at the listing for Ditto Evo, I would never have guessed what it does. (I'm not quite even a newbie to MODx, so I don't even know the terminology yet.) So, a non-programmer, non-admin could use it to create and publish an article?

Dennis

Quote from: kp52 at Nov 13, 2012, 03:42 AM

I'm still developing and supporting PubKit for Evo, and use it myself for generating and managing blogs, news items and events listings via straightfoward web-form input for routine items.

The package in the Extras includes an installer that will generate a sample sub-tree that you can cherry-pick for Ditto calls, template chunks etc.

Next version will include true previews (see what an update is like without saving to the live copy), and possibly the message class I use to create contact forms and guestbooks.

:-} KP

NB if you search the Extras, you'll perhaps come across an earlier version called pkBlog. The links to it don't work, because I dorked up the process of marking it as "deprecated".

Thanks for the reply kp52.

PubKit looks very cool, but is not what I'm looking for in this instance.

I want site members (not admins or programmers) to be able to write and publish simple articles - with no help and no understanding of MODx elements. If you look at this article on MyFiredoglake, you'll get an idea what I'm looking for. The typical article will be just text (I hope not, but I'm being realistic.) A step up from that would be an article that is mostly text, with one or more images or even an embedded video. A sophisticated article might use images as thumbnails to open larger versions of the image (or a Lightbox-type functionality) and/or have a multi-page article.

Unlike MyFiredoglake (My FDL), I would not want articles to follow one-after-another in blog-like fashion, but be separate articles.

Also, the authors will mostly have no knowledge about even HTML, much less be able to use sophisticated back-end features of MODx, like adding elements.

I'm a database programmer, so creating the table structure for this would not be difficult. CKEditor has the capability of using templates, so the non-HTML savvy author could choose from a list of simple templates that I could create, pop one up into the CKEditor (a richtext editor like Tiny Mce), and add their content.

Other than 'comments' and 'pagination', I know how to do this in code - but it appears that Evolution has an Extra for comments (as GP Seitzema mentioned, Jots), and one for Pagination. There even Extras for sharing to social media sites. I'm assuming that I could add the {BREAK} delimiter as an option that could be invoked from the CKEditor (it is a very customizable widget), as well as add the ability for a one-click add of social media linking icons at the end of their article.

So, that explains in detail what I am looking for in an "Articles" functionality that I hoped might be a subset of an existing 'Extra', or that I would need to hand code. In addition, I would need to create a database table for authors (for short and medium bios), and the ability for site visitors to be able to search for articles by author, keyword, or by latest date.

Dennis

Well yeah...

What we did create blog posts as resources/pages. Use a unique template with TV's for them. Put them in a folders for years/months manually. That's it. We added Jot for the comments.