Arlima has a revision control system that deals with this issue. The list does not get locked when you edit the list, but you will be notified if a newer version of the list have been saved while you made your edit. When you save the list an alert dialog will appear and say somehtings in the lines of “Johan saved version 277 of this list 4 minutes ago, do you still want to save the list?”.
You can load older versions of the list (bullet point 21 in the interface walkthrough) and manually try to resolve the conflict. This is not an optimal solution, but our editors are happy so far.
OT: You have gotten me a bit curious, what organisation do you represent Johan?
Vic, I’ve been thinking and it would be nice to create a menu so that an arlima list could be created and menu tabbed to another section of a newspaper. (e.g. News, Sports, Gaming (Indian casino news in my case), Law, Resources. Then when someone clicks on the menu it would link to the next arlima list page. I know it’s not hard to create multiple lists, but not sure how the link to each section (News, Sports, Gaming, etc.) would occur. I think that same concept would work for the original post on this issue above. Some days I have way too many articles to post and it slows down my trying to arrange articles by subject matter.
Jay, I’m having a hard time understanding what this has to do with the original post in this thread. I would gladly discuss the things that you mention but please create a new forum post for it.
/ vic
I work at the IT-unit on The Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology at Lund University. We have a program for journalism (is it called that in english) and we uses Arlima in two websites. One which is a closed “shadow” of Sydsvenskan and the other one is an open one jolugranskar.
The students used the closed site for the first time this monday and everything went totally bezerk then 20 students edited 5 arlima lists:)
I have slightly modified the page template (jolu-page-arlima.php) To get which list to show from the url. This was before the latest version were you could select which list to show on a certain page.
$urlpart = trim(substr(get_permalink(), strlen(get_home_url())), "/");
if ($urlpart == "") {
$urlpart = "frontpage";
}
I also added listing of all the articles with the same category (not present in the arlima list) at the end of the page
$catID = get_cat_ID($urlpart);
if ($catID != 0) {
query_posts( "cat=" . $catID);
while ( have_posts() ) { the_post();
if (! in_array($post->ID, $articles_in_arlimalist)) {
?>
<?php the_date('Y-m-d', '<h2>', '</h2>'); ?>
<?php echo get_the_time("H:m"); ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php the_post_thumbnail(array(48,48), array('class' => 'alignright'));
echo get_the_excerpt();
?>
<span class="catlinks"><?php the_category(', '); ?></span><br>
<?php
} // end if
} // end while
}?>
I am very pleased overall with arlima and the only issue so far is the concurrent editing. Thanks a lot guys for making this openly available.
One question: How does the editorial office handle this situation? Is it one person who edits one list or do they sit in the same room and communicates changes or how?
At vk.se each web editor is responsible of a set of lists. The front page is managed by several web editors but on a schedule so there’s never more than one person at the time working with the list. I’m not totally sure how it’s organized at the other newspapers (folkbladet.nu and sportnu.se) but I think it’s on rare occasions that several editors works simultaneously on a list.
We have been thinking of something like a “diff view”, similar to those you can use with your common version control system. You would get two lists on the screen, yours to the left and the latest version to right, the differences between the lists visualized with background colors some how. You would then solve the conflicts manually in that view.
But since this issue isn’t a problem at our newspapers this feature will get very low priority, it won’t be implemented any time soon.
