Articles Feature
Kenneth W. Richards
Orvado Technologies

Introduction

The articles or news stories are the heart of the nuke application. They appear on the home page in the main (center) content area. Generally speaking, these are news stories which your readers can review and then comment on.

Whether you want to post partial stories and link to an external site containing the full story (as Slashdot does) or if you want to post a whole article, you may do so with the article feature. It allows you to manage a large collection of articles and will provide archiving and searching for visitors to your site.

Creating Articles

Before you start creating articles, you will want to create categories to help you organize your articles. When you read a large newspaper, you will notice that it is divided into many sections. Each section contains a specific "type" or category of information. You have the national news, local news, sports, entertainment and classifieds.

By breaking your news articles down into categories, you allow your visitors to view the specific information they are looking for and also avoid certain types of articles they are not interested in.

Also, like other popular article-based sites, the home page has a sampling of all different types of articles together. The user must navigate to a specific category to find news specific to that type.

Defining Authors

Every article in your system must have an author assigned to it. This is the person who wrote and/or submitted the article. The administration interface allows you to define as many articles as you like. Before you go to add a new article, you must make sure the author exists and create it if you need to do so.

The database will track as many authors as you want. To assign an author to a new article, you simply select the author from a drop-list control on the web form. The author name will show up directly under the article title so your readers will know immediately the source of the story.

Archiving Articles

In order to keep a historic record of past news articles that were posted, the article archive allows visitors to browse previous "issues". We don't actually keep track of issues in the sytem, instead, we just organize articles on a month-by-month basis.

When viewing the article archive, a person can see an overview of all of the previous months when articles where posted along with a count indicating how many articles were posted during the month. To view all articles posted during the month, the user would simply click on the month name.

For some sites which post a large number of news articles, we might require a finer grained breakdown for thhe archives. We could break down the archives on a week-by-week basis. This has not been written yet, but should be fairly simple to do.

Comment System

One of the major components of the article features is the ability for visitors to login and post comments. Anybody is allowed to post comments, not just regular visitors to the site. The comment system uses a "threaded discussion forum" format similar to Slashdot.

As of this writing, the moderation system for the comments has not been written yet, but should be out shortly. This will allow respected members to gain moderation points for contributing to our community. They can then use these points to "score" other people's comments. This way, the article comments become a "self-policing" system and we can weed out all of the negative, offensive and off-topic remarks.

Summary

The article system provides a flexible system for managing a large collection of news stories. It provides your readers with a simple way to discuss news stories with other people who have the same interests.

With an article search feature, categories and the article archive, you can organize your stories in an intuitive way that allows your readers to easily browse your content. The administration interface makes it easy to add, edit and delete articles to the system.

Last Updated: Oct 01, 2003