Feature Request: Monthly Issue Focus

  • fredhead

    (@fredhead)


    11 years, 5 months ago

    Perhaps this is a bridge too far. In case it is of interest, however, Edit Flow would be more useful to me if it had this additional functionality:

    I want to publish a monthly online/print magazine that has 7-10 sections. I need to see a view of stories across 5-6 (or more) issues with the ability to move stories between issues. I want to ensure each issue is complete relative to other issues, with the ability to move stories to balance out content included in each issue.

    It also would be helpful to see stories grouped by section. In essence, each issue is a parent category, sections are child categories of each issue category, and the stories are grandchild categories of each issue category. The only wrinkle is that sections can aggregate stories from multiple issues.

    Once stories are in place, then it would be great to right mouse-click to create a post for that story and then enter the story into the existing Edit Flow functionality.

    It also would be helpful to export the data as a simple spreadsheet (CSV is fine). I’ve mocked up a dummy spreadsheet here that shows the monthly issue view for 12 issues:

    http://snipurl.com/25pgduk

    It might be easiest to emulate a spreadsheet layout (e.g. sections in left column, issues as columns to right of sections), with possibly vertical side tabs for each issue/month that, when clicked, open the column for that issue/month. The user opens the issue columns they want to work with then drag/drop stories, add stories, and so on across columns.

    From a coding perspective, in terms of how to identify sections to use, perhaps you would create a new “section” taxonomy within Edit Flow? Or use user-identified categories under a root Post category (e.g. all child categories under Sections where the user identifies Sections as the source of the categories to use for sections)? The latter approach would get you the cross-issue view of all stories for a given section.

    Basically, Edit Flow works great for daily blogging/publishing. If people are inclined, it would be great if Edit Flow also worked for managing editorial for monthly single issue publishing.

    Hopefully this is clear. And, more important, hopefully it would be useful to the community to add this functionality. YMMV of course.

    Thanks!

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/edit-flow/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter fredhead

    (@fredhead)

    11 years, 5 months ago

    Sorry, Snip URL thinks my link to an Excel file is spam. Ouch. I was trying to be efficient. Here is the full URL to my sample file:

    http://owlhillmedia.com/files/sample-issue-calendar-2012-1126.xlsx

    I can assure you it is plain Vanilla Excel.

    Plugin Contributor Daniel Bachhuber

    (@danielbachhuber)

    11 years, 4 months ago

    How do you see this being similar to and/or different from the existing Story Budget?

    Thread Starter fredhead

    (@fredhead)

    11 years, 4 months ago

    The story budget likely would have each month’s issue as the top-most level, perhaps as a drop down list and, within each issue selected, then you would have what you currently have: All Stories plus stories grouped by categories.

    On the Calendar, in a way, each day of the week column could be turned into a month column to display 7 months with a single cell for each set of stories for that month. Previous/next links would let you move forwards or backwards 7 months at a time. That might be the easiest way to repurpose what you have.

    The biggest hit likely would be to have a setting that flips these two interfaces, story budget and calendar, between monthly (issues) and daily/weekly. Probably that’s adding a checkbox/radio button the ef-calendar-settings page and adding a Story Budget Options button and a page with the checkbox/radio button with the two options (monthly and daily/weekly). Then you’d have to update the calendar and story budget pages to display based on the options.

    If you were truly ambitious, on the calendar view, it might be nice to see more than 7 months at a time. And the ability to export the monthly calendar to CSV with a column for each month would be great, too.

    Let me know if that’s not clear or enough detail. Thanks for at least considering the idea. And thank you for such a useful plugin!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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