News plugin - portal

julian

We have RSS feeds on a per-category basis, perhaps that's what you want?

e.g. for this category

Artem Alekseev

This could be possible if there was a way to make a customazable home page instead of using blog engines.

julian

Hi Artem, welcome back!

You can use the "custom pages" plugin to make a sort of "home page" for your site.

yariplus

I've been waiting a while to add this to nodebb-plugin-featured-threads, but I think they have been busy and haven't had time yet to review my recent PRs.

Artem Alekseev

What I really need is to be able to do a portal like nodebb.
What I can do now is to use custom page plugin, but there is no proper widget for it. I tried last posts from categories & last articles from categories. In both cases I can only change HTML for the whole widget block & I can't change HTML template for a post itself... So I think we need a proper News widget which will allow us to change templates for each news article in a feed.

Also I couldn't find a way to hide root of a custom page for example:
I have custom page http://localhost/test

And I configure home page to be test

So when I navigate to http://localhost/ I want to see http://localhost with test page content but i'm redirected to http://localhost/test

charles

@Artem-Alekseev said:

What I really need is to be able to do a portal like nodebb.
What I can do now is to use custom page plugin, but there is no proper widget for it. I tried last posts from categories & last articles from categories. In both cases I can only change HTML for the whole widget block & I can't change HTML template for a post itself... So I think we need a proper News widget which will allow us to change templates for each news article in a feed.

Also I couldn't find a way to hide root of a custom page for example:
I have custom page http://localhost/test

And I configure home page to be test

So when I navigate to http://localhost/ I want to see http://localhost with test page content but i'm redirected to http://localhost/test

Maybe custom homepage?
https://community.nodebb.org/topic/1168/nodebb-plugin-custom-homepage-basic-cms-plugin-custom-homepage

Artem Alekseev

@charles Great! It works. So the only issue now is to get a good widget which allows:

Choose a category to get articles from
Configure template for each item in an article list (HTML containers)
Configure position & size of topic picture thumbnail (first picture in a thread)
configure the position of an author and date like in a blog

yariplus

Yeah, that's basically what I want to add to the featured threads plugin as I posted. It adds the required widgets. I can make a separate plugin...
http://yaricraft.com/

Artem Alekseev

@yariplus It would be really great!

yariplus

@Artem-Alekseev

This isn't done yet, (and has a ridiculous name which I'll probably change soon.) but it's basically what I have on my site already, a homepage route for the news, a customisable template, auto-featuring categories, and the selector and widgets from featured threads. It adds its own route, so no need for custom-page or custom-homepage.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/nodebb-plugin-featured-topics-extended

(I see npm finally fixed their SPDX names...)

Artem Alekseev

@yariplus Thanks a lot!

How many characters are in a news article visible on a front page? Is it configurable with special element or tag in text?

Is there any counter to count featured news in different tags or categories? So that it could be possible to make somekind of menu to filter news my category?

Also how to manage permission to mark topics featured?

yariplus

@Artem-Alekseev said:

How many characters are in a news article visible on a front page? Is it configurable with special element or tag in text?

It's unlimited at the moment.

Is there any counter to count featured news in different tags or categories? So that it could be possible to make somekind of menu to filter news my category?

Also how to manage permission to mark topics featured?

Could you open a github issue for each of these?

If you mean filtering what topics get auto-featured, that is definitely something I'll be adding.
Right now, manual featuring is admin only. Since the news is a critical feature of the forum, I feel this is appropriate.

phit

just added version 0.1.1 to my forums!
working great so far, I modified the news.tpl to only render the news when a user is logged in and otherwise show a welcome page

<!-- IF !loggedIn -->
     <!-- IMPORT welcome.tpl -->
 <!-- ELSE -->
     {newsTemplate}
<!-- ENDIF !loggedIn -->

this seems to delay the loading though, is there a way to fix that? you can see it in action here

also one small bug I found, "{config.relative_path}" in the default template doesn't work. I just removed it as it seems unnecessary for links that go to the user profile you can just use a fixed path

yariplus

@phit Thanks!

Yeah, that's probably because it's still parsing that newsTemplate. I'll add an option.

Published 0.1.2, with option to hide from guests. For anyone who wants to get the same affect as above without modifying the templates, I added three new widget areas: contenttop, contentbottom, and contentbetween. Just add a widget there and hide it from registered users.

I'll create a topic for this asap...

(Also fixed relative_path)