I want to give certain users the ability to post news articles on my website. The artciles should be easily pulled using an SSI solution for display on the homepage. The first idea I had was:
Make a forum area where only these members can start topics. Let the topic be the news article and then let the replies be comments from the articles. Well, that's no good, because I want those articles to appear in the correct forum. ie. A music review goes into the music discussion area.
Then I thought about maybe having a mod that could flag posts by certain authors/users as a news article. Maybe it's an option when making a post. Maybe it's a button next to "NEW POLL". I don't know. Does something like this exist? I'm still reluctant to use a CMS for something so small.
I'd also like to see a mod capable of doing this, it'd be very useful. Perhaps if a php include from SSI.php would include all posts from a certain forum (wouldn't it be simpler to have a forum called "Submit News" under which sub-forums would act as areas where your article would be posted?) onto a page on the site. I'd personally like an option to display the latest article and links (acting as headlines) placed that are access to all other articles from that section of a site.
The reason I don't want to have a dedicated news forum (and this would make it easier for sure) is that I want the news articles to actually appear within the forum as normal posts so people can reply to them in an area that makes sense.
For example, I have 5 basic news categories to start with. They each correspond with popular areas of our forum. To stuff them into a category called News would be silly because that wouldn't spark more conversation involving other topics in the same area.
I think that a mod could be made to do this fairly easily. What would even be a step cooler is if we could position the placement of attached images to a post.