Articles System using a combination of mods

[beanflying]

Not sure if this may benefit someone else or not but if it does then that's a bonus. 

After having a play with several of the Articles mods available on SMF and being not all that satisfied with the way they integrated into the overall look and fit of my site. Some of this was lack of Picture integration and manipulation. On some of them being limited to a single page format wasn't going to work for more lengthy technical articles we have in mind for it. Also it took content away from the forum boards themselves making the comments sections harder to police for spam.

SO

Using SMF 2.0.2, Red it Random theme (modded) and an even more customised stripped version for this job. Also Simple Portal to manage a nice menu system for it when it gets some content and topics of it's own.

Key Mods Used
FancyPosts (some very useful special BBC codes in it)
View Single Post (fairly obvious but allows grabbing and displaying one post only no matter what the forum or user is set to)

Non Key mainly for extra formatting
Menu Editor Lite (Great mod and for setting up additional user links to the articles sections, easier than hard coding  )
Float BBCODE

The basics are single to multipage articles including Intro, Multiple mid pages and in some cases a Conclusion page but displayed ONLY PAGE AT A TIME. In my case with NO discussions to follow. Then feed it back to an appropriate discussion only thread within the relevant forum section.

Currently I have elected to hide the entire Articles board from the board index as I want the 'Articles' to appear somewhat removed and special in nature. Important to note that this only hides it to Guests, members. mods etc but it is still crawled and appears on our sitemap! When setting up the boards just make sure you set the boards to the correct permissions for view only unless you want comments to follow the articles.

To do this in BoardIndex.template.php find

Code Select Expand


if(in_array($category['id'], $do_not_show_categories))
continue;

add before, where xx is the Category number of the board you want to hide.

Code Select Expand


$do_not_show_categories = array(xx);


Partly to clean up the overall look of the Article pages and to shrink the vertical height of the menu system I have made some major mods and outright stripped some content from this customised theme. It runs a custom BoardIndex.template, Display.Template and some mods of Index.Template.

These remove any non critical information, reduce posters details and throw them right and place all mod/admin buttons to the bottom and remove the upper duplicate button strip (most likely forgotten some of it but you get the idea).

Usage

Articles are currently setup and written on an additional board then moved into position after finished. Authors are given board mod status as needed so they can work over a period without interruption and 'help' from the members At conclusion we are adding a peer review to this but that is just us being careful

As what follows is purely a cosmetic wrapper to the way the posts are displayed the writing process is simplified for the members with one post per page or section being the only complexity about it. One of the admin/mod team will then add the navigation header block and tweak it to suit.

Enter 'View Single Post' when moved into position (depending on if you are using pretty url's (we are)) grab each of the individual msg codes will be in the form of http://www.yoururl.com/forum/somesection/articlename/?msg=12345 then you have the details needed to write the navigation block using one from 'FancyPosts'.

This is a 3 page example but you will get the idea.

Code Select Expand


[menu]
[button=http://www.yoururl.com/forum/somesection/articlename/?msg=12345]Introduction[/button]
[button=http://www.yoururl.com/forum/somesection/articlename/?msg=12346]Nitty Gritty[/button]
[button=http://www.yoururl.com/forum/somesection/articlename/?msg=12347]Conclusion[/button]
[/menu]

This is then copied and pasted to the top (and the bottom if you want) of each post.

To link directly to the first post the link will simply be http://www.yoururl.com/forum/somesection/articlename/?msg=12345 this will display one post only with the navigation to the rest of them using the menu.

An example is here if you want to see what it look like and how it works. Test Example

Got any questions or want to use bits or all of it go for your life. I have no plans to consider creating a mod out of this but if anyone else wanted to happy to help out as I have gained a heap from this site.

Sorry for the length of the post too 

[Kindred]

hmmm.... I'm glad that you found something that works for you...

However,

SMF Articles, TinyPortal and PortaMX all seem to do fine jobs of creating an articles system for input and display that seems much less complicated and more integrated....

[beanflying]

But they were not what I was looking for.

I did try SMF Articles for an extended trial which wasn't multipage (proved to be a spammers magnet in the comments sections) and I did consider using Simple Portal (most members won't be familiar with the back end) as I already had it installed for this purpose but have decided to stick with using forum based content and indexing but rewrap it to suit my purposes. Partly this is to make members comfortable with adding content in a method they are used to with a small tweak at the end to add the menu system.

I also considered using board news type of functions and writing code for blocks but couldn't get my head around it easily with my limited modern coding skills (Give me Pascal, Fortran or Hex  ).

Certainly this may not be the easiest way but it suits where I want to be and keeps the article look tied more closely to the forum.