Reorganising thought, history and library - split from "worst section of libcom"

OK. So the common issues here are:

1. it's hard to find articles, and the site design isn't great for just browsing through subjects
2. history, thought and library have a lot of crossover, and one or three of them is redundant

I think the main issue is apart from some very, very quick indexes, these sections don't really exist - what we actually have is articles in tag lists, which due to views and cck (drupal modules) we can also pull into arbitrary lists (like http://libcom.org/history/tags/strikes).

Overall, the main seperations on the site are news, articles (including thought, history, library, organise), forums, and administrative content (notes etc.)

Lots of library artices are about history, some history articles don't meet the history style guide 100%, thought is sparse and not maintained well.

The main reason we have the sections is two things really:
1. historical - news, thought, organise and history have been around for a long time now, library is a couple of years old
2. to seperate "articles which look nice" - i.e. history which always has an introduction, image, and is under a certain length, from some of the craziness in the library where it's 19,000 words with weird formatting.

Here's what I think we can do:

merge the history, library and thought content types into one (for argument's sake let's call it "article"). So when people submit stuff, they get a choice of news for stuff that month, or article for everything else. That saves admin decisions about where things go like Omar's Auckland one.

We can also have an alphabetised (and others) view at articles/$tag - which does the same as history/tags/$tag does now, but for all "articles". That'll give us chronological listings for history, and sane listings for articles by author etc.

We can't have "history" and "thought" seperately I don't think - because some articles will have heavy analysis mixed with historical overviews etc., so we have to make that seperation a different way.

The current indexes are basically just links to views which isn't really good enough as evidenced above - we have too much stuff in those views to make them easily navigable (some tags have 50 pages or so), so we need to make the content a bit more accessible.

We can have lots of links to tags in a better tags section - with clouds, an alphabetical listing - improved version of what we have now, we don't need to do this in the main sections.

The sections then become portals to various collections of content - so, for example:

History ends up being a portal to portals about historical events - Revolutionary wave probably will be the first - histories of regions, histories of sectors, all kinds of possibilities. Each portal has images, random article, list of main reading (including introductions and the "history" article for that event), then links to relevant tag lists. The old Hungary 56 and IWW features are visually similar to what I think these should look like.

Thought - we move the author list from Library - have a selected one, then generate a tag list which lists all of them alphabetically. It also links to factsheet type things about various currents of theory - but I reckon they should be more historical overviews tracing schools of thought and linking to things, whereas now there's a lot of summary of "what xxxx think about". Then we maybe link to tags about various subjects - ecology,revolution, workers councils that sort of thing. And introductions - but again try to have a front-end to it so it's not just a big list. Everyday manifesto, if we ever get back to it - that'd be another panel with links to articles

Library - not sure how this would fit in if History and Thought take over. Maybe more portals which link to tags/collections on different subjects - say Wildcat strikes, uprisings, image galleries, accounts, sabotage - that kind of thing. edit: Actually we should consider scrapping library as a top-link section, and instead work on a site navigation guide - which'd function more like an actual library catalogue with how to find stuff. /library could forward to that. It could still have features about "collections" - like sabotage etc. as above.

That way the differentiation between content is done by humans instead of the database, and with much better tag listings it'll be easier for people get to "lists of things" which is currently all the indexes do really.

There's one technical issue with merging the three content types in the database, but I don't think it's major. Then it'd just be lots of panels and re-organising views to get started. Also this goes hand in hand with converting book > library.

So we don't necessarily lose the sections (except possibly library - at least in the top menu), but we get rid of the arbitrary division between actual content in the software and instead do it in terms of how it's presented to people.

OK so the main issues we have to deal with in order to do this:

1. When we set up news/history we couldn't have the 'body' field in cck node types - this means the article bodies are in a different place in the database to the library articles(and book and others). Having the 'body' field is standard drupal, and will be better for performance long term, so we need to initially change history and thought to library articles with the same database structure, then rename library.
I have a support issue on drupal.org which has starter code for that now - all that's required is converting it to drupal's db_query syntax, trying it on a scratch install then running it. http://drupal.org/node/165370

NB. If we can sort this out (any php/mysql experts who feel like helping that's always appreciated), we might as well change organise and news to use the "body" field instead of "article" as well - that way we've got a consistent database structure across the site.
NB2. introductions and images are fine - they should need zero tinkering, it's the actual articles we need to migrate.

2. We'll then need to change the "library" content type, to be called article - this is just one form in the admin panel so not hard to do.

3. This will then break all views we have which have anything to do with library, history or thought - which is a lot. And therefore it'll break the indexes and some sideblocks because those are based on views as well. The advantage is that these views will be massively simplified by having one content type instead of three, and we'll need less of them.

4. Therefore we need to have some rough indexes ready for thought and history made up to stand in for/replace our views/block generated ones. With indexes I think we should probably try to write up as much of the content manually as possible - using panels with custom content, menus like the authors one in library, then just a "new articles" feed and the odd randomised teaser so they change every so often. The actual navigation should be menus though since tags/searches etc. really ought to be it's own section. Links to indiidual articles and tags will work, so nothing's stopping us making a start on this now - new thread for each I think...

Ok history index thread here:
http://libcom.org/forums/feedback-content/new-history-index-19082007

don't have immediate ideas for thought index so will wait a bit, or anyone that does please start a new thread!

what to do with /library coming up.

Yeah that'd be a nightmare, a really nasty one with cold sweats and stuff. If we half-did the database changes, we could just change the content type for each article, but we'd have to write a mini-module to add the option in since there's no easy way to do this for most content types (different fields usually)

The only technical advantage to having say "history" and "thought" content types would be:

1. new history articles feed. However, we already use "new articles" around the site so I don't think that's a big deal. A "new articles which have either a sector or region attached" feed would almost definitely work to replace it, or something with a little bit of manual work using nodequeue module (less work than moving new articles between sections).

2. people realising they can add stuff to different sections - but again I think we'll still get mis-submissions

Not always - stuff like "What was the USSR?" Aufheben issues in general actually, some publications like prol-position and IS have bits of both. I think it'd be quite hard to make work in practice Not to mention A LOT of work to do.

Having said that - we can do all these new indexes about 90% without having merged the content types, and should probably do that stuff first anyway, so wouldn't hurt to discuss more while we get something going alongside it.

Well we could call it library - but have it like the catalogue/site guide index I started a thread for - google map, tags, some alphabetical browser thing. At the moment the index does nothing really except for the authors list. That'd still be consistent with it's name, and it'd still have the same stuff in - just you'd pick up history articles and thought articles as well (which already happens essentially).

Yeah title should have dates in for everything whether we go for articles or articles + history. The other option (or just do both) is we make a date field and order by that - which hopefully one day could double up for on this day filtering.

OK so it's now feasibly possible to merge thought/history/library into one node type - literally five minutes work + fixing all the views and panels afterwards, the question is whether we want to do it...

We seem pretty much decided that thought and library should be merged, so let's do that pretty soon. We can then work on a parellel thought index panel which takes the authors and stuff from library.

history and library. OK a few comments for and against:

history/library/thought all together:
For
1. views like "latest articles" become very easy (although it's not hard now really)
2. no-one has to decide which section things go into, because there's only news and "article"

Against
1. Impossible to do a list of just library articles, or just history articles - all lumped in together. Having said that, theoretical articles should never have a region or sector set, ever, so we could probably filter by "has a tag in region or sector" without any great difficulty. So all navigation will be via tags and manual navigation
2.we'd either have to change urls to /article/title-something-something, or do them manually.

keeping them separate
For:
1. easy to do a chronological list of history articles - could also add in a "date" field and order by that instead of alphabetical by title so it's more accurate and this'd then let us do things like timelines for tags etc.
2. can keep /history and /library urls generated automatically(I think this could swing it actually since it makes theming and blocks way, way easier)

Against:
1. need to convert all history-esque library articles to history content type - this is just one word in the database, but currently no user interface for it. Probably easy to hack something up though
2. sometimes people will add things to the wrong section, and some articles will be in-between, a user interface for (1) will make that easier though.

So....

for now, I reckon we should change all thought articles to library and delete the thought content type - this affects hardly anything because thought has a crap index at the moment and we don't filter by thought anywhere else.

And let's leave history and library seperate, maybe try out a massive database update where "any library article which has a region or sector or biography tag attached is converted to history" - which should catch 85-90% of articles - worst that happens is we have to change some back the other way.

How's that sound??