Thread

I want to make a news portal and i’m trying to find which extensions or add-ons i should use so you could give me some help

There will be different levels of access like super admin (total access), chief editor (can approve or not articles that journalists and columnists write, approving comments), journalists, columnists (with certain access only to the parts they refer to them)

So one entry will include a

• News title
• News URL
• Category of news (from a list of categories e.g. sports, politics, education, agriculture etc. – also the chief editor should be able to add new ones if it is needed). There can also be subcategories
• Type of news (from a list of types like news, article, inetrview, special report, press announcement) and many of them can be selected at once. Also the chief editor should be able to add new ones if it is needed)
• Date
• Keywords
• Area (from a list of areas - and many of them can be selected at once. Also the chief editor should be able to add new ones if it is needed)
• Source (from a list of sources like a website, an author, a journalist, etc)
• Small description that can appear in the front page and in the news’ page above the main text
• Main text (the text of the article)
• Importance (levels of importance like “theme of the day”, “secondary news”, “just news”, etc. and this importance will decide the order of the news in the main page
• Status (open, closed, pending, scheduled)
• Main theme image or secondary news image or just news image for the main page and news page image
• Video if there is some available

Apart of news there will also be other channels for categories, types, authors, areas, sources

I am thinking to use

1. CHANNEL IMAGES 5.1.1 for the manipulation of images,
2. WYGWAM for the main text (hopefully it can be combined with the previous add-on) ,
3. Date Field Filter for displaying news during a certain time period
4. Facebook Connect for Recommended stories from facebook
5. Primary category for setting primary category to every entry
6. Tag for keywords for every entry
7. NSM Twitter for posting directly to Twitter account
8. Securit:ee for security of the site
9. Google Maps for ExpressionEngine
10. CX Disqus Comments 1.1.0 for system comments

My questions

I’d like to have next to every article dispalyed a list of 5 articles related to this one and also if this article is part of a story (series of articles) to display all of them in another list. Shall i use extension “Tag” or “Playa” for relating entries?

Also for every news there will be one main image associated with article. This in front page needs to be eg. 400pixels dimensions, then in articles’ page 300px and in some other page 50px. Is there a way to handle the image by coding, is there any ready-made extension like “CHANNEL IMAGES”. And what will happen if we change the layout in the future and need different dimensions. Would the image resize by changing preferences in one place or do i need to upload the image multiple times in different dimensions?

Do you have some more useful suggestions on using some other extensions if they are any better?

Thanks from Kostas

Moved to Community Help forum by Moderator

Hi, Kostas.

Sounds like a great project.

If I were doing this, I’d use Playa to specifically point to articles I wanted to relate. You can use categories, but if you want fine grain control and don’t mind paying for an add-on, it’s worth it.

As far as images go, I’d use CE Image. Not that Channel Images isn’t a great product, I’m used to using CE Image. In CE Image if you decide you need a different size, it’s created for you on the fly. Nothing you need to do on your end.

Since you have already purchased EE, I’m going to go ahead and move this to the Community Help forum so other community members can comment.

Good luck on your project!

Hi Sue

shall i create channels for types of news, authors, categories and then to relate them with Playa for every article (entry)? Do you think i will be able to have multiple choices with Playa?

Also for images do you think i will achieve different sizes for different pages for the same image without uploading it only once with the extension you mention?

Also

let’s say i have a channel for journalists or some other source of news. When i will enter the entry in the channel of news i shall be presented with the list of the already inserted journalists. Will i be able to insert a new journalist directly there without having to move to the journalists’ channel to insert the new entry with its data and then to return to news channel to pick the new one?

Any already made extension that can do that?