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Suggestions for group blogging / story submission solutions
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- Mike Atherton
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 34
- Thanks: 0
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Hey,
I run the creative writing site Great Writing ( www.greatwriting.co.uk ). Sadly, the site is very old and creaky now - it was built using Mambo (predating Joomla!) and a lot of custom hacking.
So it's time to rebuild things from scratch, and I'm hoping that these days I can put together the basic functions of the site using off-the-shelf components, with no hacking required. The core proposition of the site needs to allow:
- registered users to post articles (actually short stories, poems etc.) into a set of pre-defined categories
- users to be able to keep multiple articles they're still drafting in a private (ie. invisible) unpublished mode
- for those articles to allow comments by other registered users
- for these users to have NO access or visibility to any more (potentally confusing or dangerous) CMS functions than they need
So far I'm considering using:
phpBB: In this model, each new article would be a new forum post, with replies in the same thread serving as comments on the original post. It's not totally ideal, since it still feels a bit 'forumy', with all submissions at the same level, rather than a principal post followed by comments.
K2: This is supposed to do group blogging, but I think its popup interface for writing a new post is confusing and offers too many Joomla options (RokCandy macros, image and attachment adding, etc.)
Anyone got any other ideas?
Cheers,
Mike
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- Paul Spencer Wimpenny
- Newbie
- Posts: 7
- Thanks: 0
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I personally would go with k2 for the management of the site and add JCE for the editing. It requires a subsription but JCE has a template manager module that allows you to restrict users (in groups) from certain functions and certain parts of the site.
Hope this helps
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- Ben Lee
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 4193
- Thanks: 42
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Think hard about moving to K2. It's a great system and really does what you need, but it completely separates itself from Joomla and other extensions. It's really it's own internal system all the way down to how the articles are stored. If you want to move back to just Joomla from K2, you can't because the articles are not stored in Joomla's core.
It's great and does a lot, but it's really more of it's own system than an extension of Joomla.
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- Mike Atherton
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 34
- Thanks: 0
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Yes I'm cautious about K2, since it seems like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, as the saying goes. Mostly I dislike its interaction design around story submission, and even if using JCE to allow rich text editing, it still presents confusing options to novice users.
Any other extension suggestions? I know there's a lot of blogging stuff out there, but would be most interested in stuff people have first-hand experience of, particularly with an audience of non-hardcore users.
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- Krazza
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 435
- Thanks: 1
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Hey Mike, I helped on similar concept last year....started with Article Factory Manager ...from TheFactory...went to Mighty Extensions after that but gave up because of their complicated support and many many other reasons.
One issue I had was the client went to wanting paid submitting of SINGLE articles!!! ....i couldnt find anything that worked easily doing that......still cant...
If you know of something or if K2 can do this with another comp added in, I might be back in the game. :shock:
I would be interested in seeing what you decide on...
Cheers
edit: The issue with the Article Factory I might add was users could see all sections and categories for the site......not good.......the rest of it would fit for you i think.... - Black & White must be making a come back
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- Mike Atherton
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 34
- Thanks: 0
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Fortunately I don't need to worry about paid submission, but yes - too many of these extensions seem to be designed to give front-end editors almost as much control over article submission as administrators, and for general community sites I just don't think that's appropriate.
Perhaps I could use K2, but use Chronoforms (or similar) to design my own article submission form?
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