Textpattern CMS

#31 2006-11-24 03:24:07

Mary

Sock Enthusiast

Registered: 2004-06-27

Posts: 6,236

Re: automaticly deleting (expired) articles

…part of this patch I submitted for evaluation to the Textpattern developers, so it will eventually be included into the “official” Textpattern code.

Assuming it is accepted, yes. As for myself (don’t know about the others), I haven’t had the time to look at it yet.

#32 2007-02-13 21:34:28

uli

Moderator

From: Cologne

Registered: 2006-08-15

Posts: 4,316

Re: automaticly deleting (expired) articles

hi rick,

your article-expiration-plug is getting better and better rather quickly :) here it is, the entering of real dates! A great thing I’ve been waiting for!

You’ve implemented some interesting features. But two of these may be solved smoother in order to avoid user faults. I’m writing this very frankly because you’ve proven to be open to new ideas about improvements.

1) Is it possible for you to make the order of the date entries user defined? By the actual sorting order you’re covering the more technically versed users. There are all kinds of date formats, like the (I think) american mm-dd-yyyy or the european dd.mm.yyyy. As well as choosing the order of the entries there should be the possibility of choosing the separator , as there are inexperienced or uninformed users. Maybe even a *-wildcard-separator is possible, so that any non-alphanumeric/whitespace character would be accepted.

2) A little bit easier for you to realize would probably be this one here:
Giving the custom field a user defined name would be great for all non-english speaking countries. And this way the custom field’s name could also serve as a reminder of how to fill in the field: e.g. “Expiration date (yyy.mm.dd)” .

The next one is rather a pretty dream, but maybe it can be solved, too, come a time.
As I understand, the automatic article deletion can be triggered by merely entering the content tab. OK, this is painless. But it is semi-automatic, it’s something like a photoelectric barrier I have to pass.
The idea behind is to combine real automatic deletion/expiration with the insertion of a “No entries here”-message, in order to run the site completely unattended for a while. Together with plugs like stw_category_tree, which can hide categories without associated articles in them, a real system of automatisms would become possible.
I know there is pm_if_no_articles for the task of putting up a sorry-message, but if it works at all in 4.0.4 it works only if there is no article for that category, not even a hidden one.

Can you think of implementing at least one of the first two ideas? I’d greatly appreciate any of these!

Last edited by uli (2007-02-13 21:41:17)

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_{In bad weather I never leave home without wet_plugout, smd_where_used and adi_form_links}

#33 2007-02-13 22:37:48

rsilletti

Moderator

From: Spokane WA

Registered: 2004-04-28

Posts: 707

Re: automaticly deleting (expired) articles

Hi Uli,

The features you request aren’t something that I feel are best done with the delete articles plugin approach; by inherent design characteristic the problems accumulating with greater complexity, especially for multi user situations, render the idea to cumbersome. Wet’s patch, and his reasons for it, hold true for that reason and are the better approach. By itself those interface options aren’t available to work with in the presently available TXP download, and to reinvent them is out of my skill range. The best potential I have seen lately would be to add, if not the full capabilty you describe, the database fields and form interace components to this plugin zem_event then perhaps develop a plugin from that point.