General Questions -- help, please
Tue, 22/09/2009 - 11:12
First, I do not have a demo site up so I have a series of questions based on your demo, your user guide, q & a entries on your forum pages and what I would like to be able to do. I do not know Drupal. It looks as though Prosepoint will be my choice for a community newspaper, but I need to make sure of certain functionality. Below are several questions.
Right side bar: There are 2 parts but I am not clear what those are. You have Theme switcher; Prosepoint Demo; Navigation; and User Login. Are the top 2 one part and the bottom 2 the second part? Can the side bar vary from page to page?
Under Navigation, can there be an addition that said Archives which when clicked on went to a page that had a list of the editions? Then when an edition is clicked, it opens another page showing all the articles that are part of that edition? I believe that you can set the edition to reflect all stories posted for a specific month.
Page layout
Can vertical and horizontal lines be placed anywhere on a page?
It appears that the page layout can be modified to be 1 to 3 col. wide. Is that correct?
What is the limit on type of type fonts for the stories and captions? Is this forum using TInyMCS? Where can the default type face and size be set? I am just having a problem formatting this article. Paragraph headers appear with BF and U in edit and preview but not when posted. I made a change below and that also put on some changes in B and U and I can not get rid of it. What is that about?
Daily or whatever alerts
There is a User Login but as I am putting up at a community newspaper, I do not see users having to pay to read. So is it possible to have viewers enter an email to be on a list for daily alerts with links to new stories with the current date? Is there a built in module that does that automation?
Tagging Items
If a story has a tag and the user clicks on the tag, does a blog like window open with all the stories for that tag…like dogs or politics.
Videos
Can they be inserted?
Visuals:
I've seen some questions about slide shows but not totally clear as to what the functionality was being asked about.
On www.bruchsal.org there is a story entitled Impressionen vom verkaufsoffenen. There are a bunch of photos, one on top the other. It seems that that should be a slide show like http://www.examiner.com/x-8861-Chicago-Wicker-Park--Bucktown-Examiner~y2009m9d1-Bucktown-Arts-Fest-was-a-successful-collage-of-sights-and-sounds. Is that possible?
What about rotating stories like on www.msn.com in the middle toward the top? Is that possible?
With the Search on the header, does that do a full text search on my site only?
Thanks for your help, Elaine
Wed, 23/09/2009 - 11:44
#2
Thanks and clarification
Thank you very much Beng...you did very well! :)
To clarify on the one you did not understand. Having done newspapers and newsletters before, I find that visually it is sometimes better for the eye to have a thin line to appear vertically between columns and/or horizontially between stories. I am sure that the horizontal can be done...I have seen that, but I am not sure about the vertical.
Again, thank you so very much for your responses!
Elaine
Thu, 24/09/2009 - 09:38
#3
...
Hi,
Those 'thin lines' are controlled by CSS styling. Hence, vertical lines are possible, but in practice, it may get a bit fiddly themeing it.
Hi,
Gosh, that's a lot of questions :)
I'll try to answer as best as I can ...
As a general rule, ProsePoint & Drupal are very flexible. Most of the functionality is already there. If you need something a bit more advanced, or special, that can always be added through a custom code or custom themeing.
> Right side bar: There are 2 parts but I am not clear what those are.
> You have Theme switcher; Prosepoint Demo; Navigation; and User Login.
> Are the top 2 one part and the bottom 2 the second part?
> Can the side bar vary from page to page?
These are just separate 'blocks' of functionality assigned to be visible within the sidebar regions. These are fully configurable. You can move individual blocks around, or hide them entirely, as you wish.
> Under Navigation, can there be an addition that said Archives which
> when clicked on went to a page that had a list of the editions?
This is already availabe. You just have to add a menu item for the archives of those channels you want.
> I believe that you can set the edition to reflect all stories posted for a specific month.
Not quite, not yet. However, you can set the edition to show an arbitrary list of stories and that might be satisfactory for your situation.
> Can vertical and horizontal lines be placed anywhere on a page?
Not quite sure what you mean here.
> It appears that the page layout can be modified to be 1 to 3 col. wide. Is that correct?
The default theme has two sidebars on the right. Furthermore, editions themselves can be 1 to 3 columns. So, overall, depending on what you're doing, you can have anywhere up to 5 columns. That's only with the standard functionality. Additional layouts can also be added through additional coding.
> What is the limit on type of type fonts for the stories and captions?
These are controlled through CSS stylesheets in the theme. There are no restrictions, however, any CSS changes must be done by 'editing code'. It can't be done through the front-end.
> Is this forum using TInyMCS?
This forum, and ProsePoint, uses TinyMCE.
> Where can the default type face and size be set?
Controlled through CSS stylesheets.
> I am just having a problem formatting this article.
Probably because your user account doesn't have enough privileges to post full html. So, your posts are processed, and any disallowed tags are stripped out (for security reasons).
> So is it possible to have viewers enter an email to be on a list for daily
> alerts with links to new stories with the current date? Is there a built in
> module that does that automation?
ProsePoint doesn't have that functionality as standard. However, I expect there is a Drupal module out there that does.
> If a story has a tag and the user clicks on the tag, does a blog like window
> open with all the stories for that tag…like dogs or politics.
ProsePoint can be configured to do this.
> Videos Can they be inserted?
Qualifiably yes, but the degree to which they can be inserted depends on what you are trying to insert ie. uploading a whole video, or just posting an embedded snippet like Youtube. It depends.
> Visuals:
ProsePoint as standard doesn't do slideshows, but there are several Drupal modules which do. Since everyone does their slideshow differently, I have no further comment to make on the technical details.
> With the Search on the header, does that do a full text search on my site only?
Yes, but that is configurable.