Content improvements - feedback needed
< New upgrade guides | Blog Archive | Majestic 1.5.2 - security update plus small improvements >
Updated April 2nd: I've decided to rewrite this post because a few people have said it's not as easy to follow as it could be. Please have another read and see if you have any comments. Thanks.We're looking to include a few improvements to Majestic and we'd like to get your feedback on these.
Drafts
With drafts you'd be able to save an unfinished post to work on later. Handy if you have an idea for a post but you don't have time to complete it. This would be simple to use - a new "Save as draft" button would be available when you're working on the post.At the moment we have a "Save changes" button that will publish the content on your site. This would probably be changed to "Publish" or something similar, as having two "save" buttons would be confusing.
Moderated content
This would allow users to write posts, but when they go to submit the post, it would go into a moderation queue. A site admin would need to approve or deny the post. Denied posts could be given a reason so the user can see what they need to do to correct it. An approved post would be published as usual.Future dated content
This would allow you to create a post but change the date so it's in the future. The post would not be accessible to your visitors until the date is reached. So if it's 1st March and you create a post with a date of 12th March, it won't show up until 12th March.Deleted content
Deleting a post would stop people from reading it, but it would not actually be deleted for good. This means you'd be able to reverse the deletion if you change your mind.As is the case at the moment, you would be able to control who can and cannot delete content.
My Content
This would be a new link in the UserCP (accessible to all users who are logged in). Users with access to create content would also have access to My Content and they would see the following information:- Drafts that they created.
- Posts that they created that are awaiting review.
- Rejected content that they created, along with any comments.
- Approved content that they created, or just a list of published posts if moderated content is not in use.
- Future dated content that they created, and the date when the post will be displayed on the site.
- Deleted content that they created.
Please let us know what you think of these proposed changes and whether you have any suggestions to make them better. Thanks for your input!
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Comments on Content improvements - feedback needed
Not to worry, Lauren -thanks for stopping by all the same. Hopefully when these options are available you'll find them beneficial for your site. :)
Thanks for rewriting your questions, Ben. This is much more clear to me now - always like it when a man is clear about his intentions! lol
I'd love to see you prioritize the Drafts and Future Date features! Could the Moderated Content thing be handled in user permissions, I wonder? - i.e., one set of users can pub without moderation, while another group needs that approval step. I can see where that might be useful. And the My Content sections sounds good to me just the way you've got it laid out: very useful for multi-author sites. Any chance that user permissions also could limit the specific "site areas" where user content can be posted? Oh, wait - we can do that already with area permissions, am I right?
Hi Jen, thanks for the comment. The largest part of this is updating the system so it can tell whether content should be displayed or not. Once that is done, the rest should be pretty quick to do.
We were going to do all of this at once but it might be safer to do it in stages, otherwise there's a greater risk of creating new bugs. I can look at doing drafts and future dated content first.
You can already control content creation with area permissions. Splitting the "create article" permission into one with approval, and one without approval, seems like the best way to do it.
Now that 1.5.2 has been released, we should be looking at some of these changes for our next version. :)
Just on a skim read, this looks helpful and useful. Drafts are a great idea, and I like the idea of a non-permanent deletion (like 'un-publish'). I don't know how I would use the moderated content (except for comments) unless I was dealing with multiple contributors to a blog/site. I'm NOT back in the swing of things here, but just wanted to drop a quick comment.
Thanks for the feedback, sweetmummy. :) Moderated comments are a different thing but we want to include those too. Hope you get back into the swing of things soon.
I like all these ideas, and I think I would use them all at some point.
Two I like especially, if you are looking for an idea of what to focus on first - Drafts, and Future dated content.
Related to the future dated content, there's something else I would like to try in the future. (No, as usual, I haven't tried it out yet, but want to.) Would it be possible to draw either some random posts from various blogs/pages onto a feature page and/or look through a pool of posts. I think for the loop the posts would need a flag, or the loop will have to be a list.. I haven't really thought about how to do it yet, only that it would be nice to do a regularly changing feature, preferably without having to do it all by hand.
Hi Andranneth, thanks for the feedback. Another vote for drafts and future dated content. I'll make a note.
It should be fairly simple to provide a list of random content via a plugin. I'll get that working and post on the blog when it's ready.
That sounds great, thank you.
ben - i really wish i could answer your questions and help along with the process...unfortunately, i'm very new at running my own site and so much of what you say is still geek to me. :)