BuriedPlanet To-Do List

Ok, I trimmed off the previous comments from this post, and updated my To-Do list. I'm proud to say that more items were crossed off than remained to be done. I figured that since the previous comments were all related to the previous tasks, this page would load faster without the old comments.
Anyway, back at it!

All the old movie reviews have been converted to the new format - at least, all of the reviews that I could find!
 

The To-Do post is now a Page - I figure this will make more room for the newest content up front. I'm pretty happy - our traffic is picking up. I'm noticing more and more people (anonymous, for now) visiting the site. In a week or so I'll check GoogleAnalytics and see how we're doing.

Looking good.
 
Ok. You asked about poetry, and what possible additional fields to track.
Date Written might be an obvious one. (for mine, the method of id is by date - 6.6.09-1 for example had I written one today, the date, combined with whichever work it was for that day, rarely higher than -3, though I have come across some real old ones with a -10) Maybe the id is separate from date written?
Author (since our category does include some not written by me)
Prior publication reference? You mentioned this in the soliciting of ideas. I am not smart enough to have an indexed table of contents for the prior published stuff; after all, the first 36 pages were photocopies of handwritten pages. They had a table of contents, and the subparts that were added later also had tables of contents, but they were never actually compiled into an index.
As for formatting. Good question. I'll need to think on that some more.

I've been reviewing the structure of your poetry posts, and here are my thoughts:
Introduction field -- you can enter text that would act as the 'teaser', an explanation of when the work was written, the circumstances, etc.
content field (existing) -- place just the poetry itself here.
original creation date -- put in the date of when it was actually written.
The advantage of the introduction field is that I could make its contents visible in the poetry page listing. The advantage of the original creation date field is that visitors could then sort the poetry by that field.
How would you feel about putting in a 'star field' for rating your work? Again, this could be a sortable field -- over time visitors could rank your work, and that could become a sortable field. You could also rate your own work in this way.

That sounds quite workable. There is already a teaser break in between the lead-in and the poetry itself, even if I havent put it in all of them, it's the logical break. The category list seems smart enough to make that break.

experimenting with skins today? ;)

If anyone sees a theme out there that they especially like, let me know. You can find them at drupal.org.

Poorman'sCron module is installed -- I need to play with it a bit and find out more of what it can do. Right now all it's doing is keeping the searching indexes up to date.

Also, the 'Rating' label was changed yesterday to 'Movie Rating' so that it's clear what people are rating.

The site is now tracking how often content is being accessed -- you may be seeing '2 reads' etc., appearing near content, to indicate how many times the post or review has been read. There's also a new content 'block' on the left sidebar showing which content is popular.

The random quote is now appearing to the right of the site logo.

I got rid of the 'new blog posts' block on the sidebar. It was only showing blogposts, completely omitting movie reviews, polls, quotes, links, etc. So I created a new block (still a work in progress) that lists the last 20 bits of content, regardless of what type of content.

I'm considering grouping by content type.

For example:

blog posts
-blog post #1
-blog post #2
-blog post #3

movie reviews
- movie review #1
- movie review #2
- movie review #3

quotes
- quote #1
- quote #2
- quote #3

etc...

I may end up creating individual blocks for each content type.

There have been some minor changes to the look and usability of the site.

1. Quoting comments and posts -- this is now possible using the 'quote' link when creating a comment. The quoted content is wrapped in quote tags and the person who is being quoted is listed. You can trim down the text within the tags if needed, and when saved the quoted text is styled in a particular way.

2. Fivestar widget for reviews has been changed so that the colors of the stars is red -- makes it easier to pick out the ratings.

3. I've created some new blocks to track new content. If you go to your user profile you should see an option list of these content blocks (New Quotes, New Movie Reviews, etc.) with check marks next to them. By checking/unchecking these options you can customize the left sidebar. If you're not really that interested in new blog posts, quotes, etc. - uncheck those boxes.

My next project is to work on the movie reviews page, to make that look a little bit 'tighter' -- smaller text perhaps, and it has to be sortable. So I'm thinking of possibly using genre listings (horror, sci-fi, drama, etc.) and a list by rating. I really want to see that content type grow, so making it easier to access has to help.

Also, I've been tracking the sites statistics using GoogleAnalytics, and we're trending nicely upwards in terms of new vistors to the site and page views. Our stats went down to zero for about a week, and currently we're at about half our original (pre-migration) views, but trending upwards again.

Any feedback would be welcome.

If you've got a tool or module or something to remind of unpublished drafts when logging in... maybe as an additional link in that box where these appear:

Just a thought. If only because it takes me a while to polish and complete any review I do...

I should state that right now, it takes going to "my account" then "CMF" but that list also includes published material, though it can be filtered down to "not publised" with a third click. A single link in that box would save a few steps, and might well be useful to others too.

Agreed. It's on the list, and I'll find an option.

Certain content types (blog post, movie review, poetry) now will show an option called 'Save Draft' - if you create content and then hit the 'Save Draft' button, your content will be saved, but not made viewable by the public. To view your drafts click on the 'My Drafts' link on the sidebar, and you'll see a list of just your own drafts which you can then view, edit and delete.

NOTE: All drafts that have not been edited for longer than 60 days will be automatically deleted.

For right now, unpublished content (viewable using the CMF tab in your user profile) is not the same as a draft. That content will not be affected by the 60+ day rule. I've only just installed the Draft module yesterday, and only just managed to get it working this morning, so please, feel free to test it out and report any problems to me.

I made a test draft just for you. I see it works within the compose page, rather than a save and edit anew. I think WP worked the same way. It looks like saving this way does not attach a timestamp to it, and the list of drafts will show the last update time of the draft.

And if I can't finish something in 60 days.... maybe I shouldn't have been writing it to begin with. Speaking of drafts in progress... I had a scheduled time to finish that Source review by last weekend. Did I? Nope. I started one for 1945's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Did I finish it? Nope. But I will try and get to both of those faster than I did with Spiderman3. Maybe I am overthinking these things by not publishing sooner?

I was contemplating the proper punishment, now that you mention it.

LOL! No, I think the Spiderman 3 review was fine. I unpublished it and left it to you to republish when you were satisfied. As for the Highlander review, take your time. I'm in no position to criticize you, as I have at least 10 reviews (some partially written) that are unpublished. I am planning a review of David Lynch movies.

What I'm not sure how to do is schedule content to be published in advance -- WordPress handled post-dating posts very easily, I'm not sure if Drupal can do this natively or if I need a module to make that possible.

Adding it to my list now, heh!

You can change the publish date/time in the "Authoring Information" in the create content page but I think it will publish whenever you hit save. Yep. Just tested it that way. It shows up right away even with future date.

Hmmm... the quote function seems to auto italicize the quoted content, at least as used in the MN senate post a second ago. Actually, seems it did that on the Sotomayor ones too. Guess by tagging it quote, it loses prior formatting...  (Not the quote link for an existing post or comment, but the quote function in the edit window)

It may be CSS styling that is overriding the tags.

Here's what we want -- to be able to create some content (a blog post, poetry, movie review, poll, etc.) and set a date for when we want it to become published. We also may want to make that content become unpublished after a certain time span.

I've installed a module called Rules that should allow me to do this, but I'm still wrapping my brain around how it works. For now, as an experiment, whenever an author, editor or admin logs into BP, you will be automatically taken to a list of your drafts.

I'm just doing it to test out how it works, so don't be alarmed.

Noticed the draft list populate on login here at the office this AM. It includes the test draft I made back on 6-30, but also includes two blank drafts. Is the draft tool set to create one if you don't click "save draft"? (I.e. did I unknowingly cause the two blank drafts to be created by opening a create content window but doing nothing else?)

Useful tool though. I think I can delete the test draft now :)

Yes, it will save blank entries. I believe it autosaves every 60 secnds or so, perhaps longer. So if you begin a draft, and leave it blank for greater than that time span, it will be saved. Of course, after 60 days the draft will be deleted entirely if no work has been done to it, so it would eventually have been deleted.

Also, check your account settings -- it may be something you can turn off or modify the autosave settings.

I am still working on the scheduling of content -- it's tricky, but I'm getting closer. The 'login & show drafts page' behavior is a sample of what I'm learning to automate. I'm thinking of creating a page that shows all posts that have been recently updated in a more elegant manner in the future.

Confirmed. If you go to your account and hit 'Edit' and scroll down you can activate or deactivate the draft autosaving feature and change the autosaving interval.

Gotcha. I enabled and set to a high 300 seconds. No need to bother the server the default 30 seconds.

I think we ought to be down to the poetry content you posted, K - do you want to review what is left as far as content-type switchover?