CMS Looking for workflow help with articles....

محروم.كوم · #1 09-08-2010, 10:00 PM

I help manage a website http://www.cartographersguild.com/ that focuses on fantasy maps and mapmaking. The site uses VB4 and the CMS.

We do not allow image attachments to be seen unless logged in.

We want to have the "staff" pick maps posted into one of the forums (Finished Maps) and we give an award for them (using an award mod). We want to have it show up on the front page as new awards are given (and be seen by non-members), and we want the old awards to be browseable through the forums.

In the vB3.8 days this is what we did:
Created a new post in the "Featured Maps" forum, and ftp a thumbnail and full map image to the server, using those in the "Features Maps" forum post. On the site front page we had a RSS scraper that pulled the Featured Map RSS feed and displayed it. This lets non-members see the featured maps (as we weren't usign the attachment system to hold the featured map images).

We hoped to use the CMS and "promote to Article" for this but can't get a nice workflow.

Initially, I tried to just "Promote to Article" from the "Finished Maps" forum which worked OK except I would have to download the image locally, delete the attachments from the article, then re-upload the image into the Article using the WYSIWYG editor. This works OK, except the "old" choice map posts can't be browsed. Once they roll off the front page they seem to be gone. I've looked for a way to "demote" an article back into the forums (i.e. to push it into our old "Featured Map" forum) but can;t find a way to do that.

The alternate way is to first create a copy of the Finished Map post into the Featured Map forum, then promote that. I still have to do the image download/upload thing because of the way the article editor handled attachments and images differently. The big problem is I now get duplicate content, and will get some comments posted via the article page and some reply posts in the "Finished Maps" forum page.

Am I thinking about this the wrong way? Any suggestions on how to accomplish what I am trying to do?

Maybe I need to go back to the old way and just insert an RSS module on the front page and scrape and display the Finished map forum, but then I'n not using the CMS, which seems stupid.

-Rob A> __DEFINE_LIKE_SHARE__