Archived Articles

[Andrew Eddie]

Just wanting to ask how people use the archived state of articles?

Regards,
Andrew Eddie
http://www.theartofjoomla.com - the art of becoming a Joomla developer

[dukeofgaming]

I use it as revision control for my articles, this is, if I update a really outdated version of an article I really like to keep the other version.

This does not happen often though, so I'd like to see this replaced by article revision control. Maybe a recursive reference in the database to detect the latest revision and build a vector of changes?, and then having a standard "Save and overwrite" behavior and an optional "Archive previous and save as this latest"... then, the Archive would show previous versions of articles, or standalone archived ones.

I have been a lot of times in the situation of writing long articles, screwing up and not being able to undo the changes. This would be a life saver!, specially if at the content edition page I could access this archived versions.

Oh well, maybe I'm asking for too much, but this is the way I'd like to be able to use the archive.

[Mark Dexter]

Hi. Obviously we have no way of knowing this without doing some type of survey. We get a number of questions on the forums about archived articles and a number of bug reports. So people do use this feature. Mark

[G. D. Speer]

Hmm - has me wondering if I am using it as designed.

Sometimes a section blog layout is used to compose a page of articles that
comprises the online newsletter for that month.
As new articles are published, older ones are archived for access via the
Archives module and/or search.

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[Mark Simpson]

Hi Andrew,

I've never had to use article archiving, but I do know they are often
required for large enterprise/ngo/news websites. Just two days ago I
saw a request-for-quotation for the re-design of the UNDP pacific
website and archiving was a major requirement.

Why not create a hardcoded category like the current "Uncategorised"
one where all archived content goes. This "Archive" category would be
filtered *out* of the content manager by default.

I reckon interaction with the archived content on the frontend can be
adequately handled with ACL and Search.

Regards,
Mark

On Jun 12, 12:37 am, Andrew Eddie <mambob...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Just wanting to ask how people use the archived state of articles?
>
> Regards,

> Andrew Eddiehttp://www.theartofjoomla.com- the art of becoming a Joomla developer

[Amy Stephen]

<offtopic>

You have a very clever mind. Using Archive as a form of version management is very clever. Take a bit of time if you are interested in Version Mgmt, to give some feedback to Victor. He has a GSoC project that is further developing last years Version Mgmt project - I am hopeful for the outcome. Community support is really helpful - so - if you can, follow along and offer your advise.

http://community.joomla.org/gsoc2009/victor-carbune.html

</ offtopic>

[Amy Stephen]

We did a quickie Twitter survey on this a couple of months ago - and that very unscientific response was "Tried it. What the heck is it, actually?"

The Melbourne JUG is a good one to connect with on this. They took the Twitter topic to heart and spent some time discussing the issue and would likely be able to provide you guidance in what folks are looking for there. In general, their response was the same. It's not useful.

To be helpful, I think Archive needs to follow this definition of UI Pattern - http://ui-patterns.com/pattern/Archive

This is another great Usability issue, Andrew, you are really digging into all of our dirty closets. Much appreciated.

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 7:37 AM, Andrew Eddie <mamb...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Andrea Tarr at Tarr Consulting]

The problem with using a category as the archive flag is that you lose the category information. It’s not significant in a small site, but could be in a large one.

 

Andy

 

Andrea Tarr

www.tarrconsulting.com

[JM Simonet]

LOL
maybe some of you remember my many rants about the Archives system in
Mambo then Joomla...
As it is now, it is (and was) useless IMO as we can't diplay these
archives with the same types of displays as the articles.
I have renounced using them and the associated module as we can't
filter them per category, date, etc.

Instead I am creating new categories (that I call Archives) and move
articles there when they are no more to be seen normally but only as
archives.
I usually display them as table lists per category.
JM

[Mark Simpson]

You're quite right there... I obviously hadn't thought it through
enough. Perhaps just another "state". There is a good filter for that
already:

published | unpublished | archived | trashed

On Jun 12, 1:39 am, "Andrea Tarr at Tarr Consulting"

> > Andrew Eddiehttp://www.theartofjoomla.com-the art of becoming a Joomla
> developer

[dukeofgaming]

<offtopic>
Thanks Amy =), I gave feedback to Victor over here, lets see what
happens: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=304&t=396204&p=1727403#p1727403
</offtopic>

On Jun 11, 8:39 am, "Andrea Tarr at Tarr Consulting"

> > Andrew Eddiehttp://www.theartofjoomla.com-the art of becoming a Joomla
> developer

[Ron Severdia]

I also only use archiving as a form of version control. But if real
version control is added, I'd just keep it as another state, as
suggested above.

[Andrew Eddie]

Hi Andrea.

What do you mean "lose the category information" ?

What I'm sort of hearing is what I expected, and I to was wondering if
since we have a better category system whether it was relevant
anymore.

Regards,
Andrew Eddie
http://www.theartofjoomla.com - the art of becoming a Joomla developer




2009/6/11 Andrea Tarr at Tarr Consulting <at...@tarrconsulting.com>:

[Andrea Tarr at Tarr Consulting]

I think it may be a moot argument at this point. What I was referring to was Mark’s suggestion that an “archived” article be one where you just changed the category to “archived”, “archived” to be a hardcoded category like “uncategorized” is. So, if we were to do that you’d be changing from an actual category to “archived”. Adding another state might make more sense than changing the category.

 

I hope that is a little clearer.

[klas berlič]

Current archive flag (or state if you like) is ok, just it's display capabilities are faulty. Add something like "Display normal/archived items? " parameter to blog/table view + add filter by month to them and and it will become much more usefull.

[Pedro Renan]

i never used.

On 11 jun, 09:37, Andrew Eddie <mambob...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Just wanting to ask how people use the archived state of articles?
>
> Regards,

> Andrew Eddiehttp://www.theartofjoomla.com- the art of becoming a Joomla developer

[Mark Dexter]

I think for better or worse we should stick with the archived flag. I agree with Klas that we can make it more useful by including it as a parameter in more places. The UI for changing status codes for a group of articles is much handier than assigning categories one at a time. Mark

2009/6/11 klas berlič <klas....@gmail.com>

[Andrew Eddie]

I think that's a good direction Mark. Rather than thinking of having
an active and an archive view, you have a setting in each view to be
able to display the archived content (exclusively or mixed I guess).

To put that another way:

* keep the archive state
* remove the Archive view and integrate
* integrate the ability to optionally display archived content within
the other views and modules

I can work with that ...

Regards,
Andrew Eddie
http://www.theartofjoomla.com - the art of becoming a Joomla developer

2009/6/12 Mark Dexter <dexter...@gmail.com>:

[G. D. Speer]

So, does all/unarchived work?

[Carolien]

I do use it as an archive for news articles.

On my website I have a news section (section blog). Sometimes I post
articles with date announcements like 'next tuesday this and this is
going to happen'. When that tuesday has passed I'll archive the
article. As a submenu of the news menu I set up a menu item of type
'articles > archive'. (website in Dutch: http://www.polsstokclublinschoten.nl/nieuws/archief)

Current annoyances with the archive view:
- it uses a lot of spaces in the article manager in the backend. It
would be better if you could select to see only published/unpublished
articles by default and that you have to select 'archive' to see the
archived articles. Just like the trash handling in 1.6
- In the frontend view you can only see the created date and time, not
the modified date and time (which I think is more important)
- when creating an article from frontend or backend I cannot set an
auto archive date (like finish publishing - really needed!)
- I can only archive articles from the news section. If I would
archive an article from another section it would show up in my archive
menu item.

Improvement
- I love the current archive view: show the title with only a couple
of lines of the article. Please keep it. It's way better than the list
layout. As an improvement: I would like to list all my news articles
here, the archived and the non-archived. So the relevant news is
visible in the news menu-item and all news is visible in the archive.


Regards, Carolien

On 11 jun, 14:37, Andrew Eddie <mambob...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Just wanting to ask how people use the archived state of articles?
>
> Regards,

> Andrew Eddiehttp://www.theartofjoomla.com- the art of becoming a Joomla developer

[wroxbox <MediaWrox>]

I am using archived news articles so that I manually after certain
time move items to archive. (Say ex 4 months)

What I am missing is:
1) module that displays archived items groupped by: year, month
2) some kind of plugin that moves articles to archive after the time
setted in config
3) option=com_content&view=archive view is like "search results" - it
could be listing years, months where there are archive items.

> > Andrew Eddiehttp://www.theartofjoomla.com-the art of becoming a Joomla developer

[elin]

AutoArchive on a certain date or after a certain amount of time would
be such a big practical improvement. Unpublish is the wrong thing to
do in those cases since it leads to 404 plus it means people don't
have access and these are not things you don't want people to have
access too.

Also, I've never understood why unarchiving has to involve a
publishing step. That is unarchive currently takes something that is
accessible to the public and makes it inaccessible. Why do we need
those extra are you sure clicks--it's not like we are losing data
forever by unarchiving.

Elin

On Jun 12, 4:05 am, "wroxbox <MediaWrox>"

> > > Andrew Eddiehttp://www.theartofjoomla.com-theart of becoming a Joomla developer