Pro_News provides a great deal of flexibility, because of which, some thought needs to be applied during implementation, as all features won't suit in all cases.

The "Classic" News module in CPG-Nuke Dragonfly is ideally suited to reporting a single stream of news, with the ability to flag each news item with a Category. But there are cases when I really needed more of an "article" based system, rather than a pure news one. As an example, imagine a website focussed on cars: You'd want articles on Engines, Bodywork, Audio, Performance, etc., each with it's own sub-categories. Until Kuragari's Pro_News BETA module came along the only real choice was the Content module - but HTML gets old quick! When I first saw Pro_News, I envisioned Pro_News not as a replacement for the "Classic" News, but as an Article-based system alongside "Classic" News. Going back to the Car website analogy, "Classic" News can cover the "short-lived" Industry news stories, and Pro_News can handle the "long lived" specific articles.

So when it appeared that Kuragari had moved on to other things, and I resolved to complete Pro_News, but in a way that allowed it to be used as a replacement to News, or to augment it.

As a result Pro_news has a number of ways to display its articles, and you need to select those which suit you specific purpose. Hopefully this article will help you make that determination.

Minimum Requirements
Before you can display any articles in Pro_News you must have at least 1 Section, at least 1 Category within that Section, and at least 1 Article within that Category. (These Sections/Categories are in addition to the non-display Default Section and Default Category preset by Pro-News.) Also if you want to support Discussion (Pro_News' replacement for Comments) you must have at least 1 Forum set up prior to creating your first Section.

Sections
Sections are the first level structure of Pro_News. Each Section can be assigned a different viewership (by Group), a different administrator (by Group) and defined to appear or not appear on the Home page. So if you have different memberships with different interests, you can assign entirely separate Sections to each. If you have a group of people (staff) who you trust to administer one Section, you can assign them administration rights over that Section. If you have articles that you want to put on the website, but don't want them to appear on the home page, then create a Section (or Sections) for just those articles.

Categories
Each Section must have 1, but can have more than 1, Category. Each Category can have a unique icon. If you need a 2-level organisational structure, then use multiple Sections each with multiple Categories. If you only need a single level, then go with 1 Section and multiple Categories, or multiple Sections each with a single Category, depending whether differing access privileges for viewing and/or administration are important to you.

Articles
Articles are assigned to Categories. But Articles can be displayed in one of 3 ways:

- as a single stream of Articles without regard to Category or Section;
- as separate sequences of Articles sorted by Section (without regard to Categories);
- as separate sequence of Articles sorted by Categories within Sections.

In the last 2 cases, title breaks appear between each change of Section/Category.

In all cases Articles display in date order descending, unless assigned an overriding display order - display order is overall, within Section or within Category as appropriate.

- layingback

In all cases Articles display in date order descending, unless assigned an overriding display order - display order is overall, within Section or within Category as appropriate.

Is there any way to have articles go in date ascending or to input a date that would allow an article to go out of order (other than assigning them numbers)? The display order only goes to 9, and I am going to have more articles appearing on the homepage. I see you have "sequence order" as an option for Photo Gallery but not for the articles themselves.

I am using Pro_News for someone who really needs to be able to move around the articles in a specific order.

By the way, this is a lovely module. You did a terrific job.
--Ann

tashaar please enter your server specs in your user profile!  

Hmmm... I don't really see how. A pull down of 99 entries would be unmanageable, and I don't want only a numeric input field there as it presents too much opportunity for accidental errors, and there is no such thing as a combo field in HTML.

But there are a couple of ways you can tackle this. The sort order is display_order and then posttime, so if you have a run of articles posted in order, you can assign them all the same number, and they will still display correctly.

Alternately, as I assume with a large number of articles in a specific order that the order will remain pretty static, you could apply any number you like to each article within the database directly, via phpMyAdmin or similar. display_order is declared as tinyint(1) so you have 0-255 as the possible range.