I have tied in some functionality from the gallery to make posting images in News stories a bit easier. You will note (hopefully it's all working) 4 entry boxes underneath the main text box. These boxes are so that you can add up to 4 image ID numbers for automatic inclusion in the news story. Just find out the ID number of the photo you want to add and put it in one of the boxes. That easy. To find the ID number just click on the photo to get to the full-size image, then in the URL find the part that says "photo=xxxxxxx". The xxxx is the ID number.

You can also add descriptions to the photos and they will appear as captions under the photos displayed in the story. Also a user can click thru to the enlargement.

Still a bit of work to do on it. I am cleaning up the whole News display tonight or this weekend. It's bugged me since the site went online.

Cheers,
Jim

Very nice function Jim. Thanks.

Uh, it's not working.

Ok, some clarification.

In the Twobobs article I wrote yesterday, the image is now in the right column and is clickable through to the large image in the gallery (though it's the same size in my article). I tried to add a new news article tonight and the four boxes for images aren't displaying via the admin add news process. If I click on the "Send Us News" link in the left column of the news section, them the boxes appear. Make sense?

Yup...I fixed that I think. You are probably one of the few editors that uses the Add News Story function in the admin panel as it as was how I discovered why yours were the only articles to include your full name instead of callsign. Fixed that too. Now everyone shows full names if they have it entered.

Jim

Jim, is the functionality above working yet? If so, how is it used because I must be missing it.

I wrote a news article today for HobbyDecal and used the four-box method of inserting the pics and it worked great. The click thorugh to the larger image worked good too.

It's working. You have to add text to the "description" field though. And I don't have a text limiter set up yet on that function but eventually it will only spit out 200 characters or so and then do a "....".

I also want to change the functionality on the discussion of news items and automatically start up a new topic in the forum. Then the news item would display all the comments in the forum below the article with a button to "Join Discussion". I think this will work better. I just don't know wether to start a new forum called "News Desk" or somthing or have a way to set the forum you want the News item posted to.

Which way do you guys think is better??

Thanks,
Jim

I think being able to have it appear in a forum to which the article pertains would be better. For instance, the HobbyDecal article would appear in the aircraft forum. If you have a seperate News Desk forum, I think people would start posting news in it directly vice submitting news stories which appear on the home page.

Ok, I see how to add the comments for the pics. That's an awesome function. Thanks.

I agree with Bryan, although inevitably there will be times when a news story crosses the line. I have just posted a story which illustrates this problem... Where would one put figures of AFV crews? In AFV or figures? Perhaps the 'News Desk' is best across ALL categories then is there anyway for them to transfer after (15 days for example) into their respective categories. Or is that a solution from a non-techy?...Jim