Part of a story as a news items?

[David A. Bayly]

Last week I helped work out a way to do this very task with the 
addedValues plugin.  The idea is to break the body into 2 parts, for 
want of a better name, we called them shortText and longText. 
shorttext is supposed to replace the news item text and 
shorttext+longtext togetehr comprise the story text.

Creating and editing stories  uses a modified EditThisPage form, with 
field for both texts. Doing it this way eliminates the need to create 
news items at all; as addedValues can display a "news page" from the 
stories in just about any way you wish. Deciding which  stories2 will 
contribute shortText to the home page can be done by date, number, as 
well as other optional properties you might add to a story (we plan 
to use topicType as a major key and a multiple valued Category to do 
this). The layout possibilities are more than adequate to format a 
news page, and can handle the sort of formatting you are asking for.

addedValues also does RSS feeds and can use the same selection 
criterion as the news page does (or better to partition the feed into 
many feeds dependent on category).

I think the only point on your wishlist I haven't covered is 
trackback.  Not sure I even managed to remember what that is, for 
more than 30 seconds after I read the definition, which indicates I 
don't understand it (or perhaps the need for it). Maybe this little 
project  will help me clarify this blind spot and find a way to 
handle it.

The addedValues plugin is free, under active development and can be 
downloaded from <http://www.addedVaues.org/>

>Hi,
>
>Right now I write a story. Then I write a news item as teaser to the 
>story and put it on the home page. I give it a slightly different 
>title to keep the shortcuts clean.
>
>What I'd like to be able to do is just write the story and block off 
>a portion of the first graf as the part that would be used on the 
>home page. The net result is that I'd have less clutter in the 
>discussion group and it would take less time to write and get up on 
>the page.
>
>An alternative would be to be able to define a section of the story 
>to be used as the news teaser.
>
>I would like to have some boilerplate at the end of the teaser: I 
>always knock down the point size a notch, type in More... and put in 
>the "shortcut link".
>
>When generating the front page, it would still have to parse to a 
>proper RSS feed and do trackbacks.
>
>Am I missing something? Can I already do this in an easy way? Or 
>what would have to be changed/added to Manila?
>
>Regards/sbw


-- 

- David Bayly.       Programmer and digest reader.     dbayly at udena dot ch
  		Digest Readers do it once a day.