Putting Impact magazines on school sites

At June 1, 2010 EWAG meeting, I talked a bit about how I'd recently set up NE's site to display their Impact magazine articles on their site. To do so, I modified the scripts and templates that assemble the articles into issues on the Engr site, stripping out the stuff that separates the school issues.

Of course I'd forgotten that I'd already done most of this work before on ECE's site.  :-/

At any rate, there are now at least 2 structures that can be set up with minimal effort on my part, if you feel a need for such an animal in your barnyard.

I don't necessarily recommend it. I think there are plans in the works to overhaul the look and feel of the online Impacts, and the result may not play well with the current structure.

If you decide to go ahead any way, here's an outline of the steps required to set up your copy of an issue once my scripts and templates have been set up on your site (specifically, this describes how I set up the latest ECE issue):

  • In /ECE/ECEImpact/ I added an event manager with the Id "2010_1" (because it's the first of the year, and putting the year first will let them sort in chronological order) and the title "Spring 2010."
     
  • I deleted all the default objects that were created inside the 2010_1 event manager (go to the Contents tab to see and remove them).
     
  • I went to the Newsletters tab of 2010_1 and added a newsletter object with Id "Spring" and title "Spring."
     
  • I went to the Documents tab of 2010_1 and clicked the "Add a Reference" link at the bottom of the page.
     
  • I opened a second window to the public view of the ECE impact that is on /Engr/, so I could see the titles of the articles, and the order in which they appear.
     
  • I noted the publication date of the first  article in the Engr window, then selected and copied the title and went back to the ECE window.
     
  • On the "Add Purdue Event Reference" form, I set the first "Modified within:" date to the day before the article was published, then pasted the title into the "Search Terms:" field.
     
  • I selected the article I was looking for from the search results and added the reference to it.
     
  • Then I went to the newsletter in 2010_1 and moved the article from "Documents not selected for Newsletter" to "Documents selected for Newsletter."
     
  • Going back to the Engr window, I copied the title of the second article, and repeated the whole cycle again: search, add reference, reload newsletter (to see the newly added reference), add to newsletter.
     
  • Finally, I got into the Zope interface (Documents tab) for the Engr 2010_1 event manager. Sorting by Type, I moused over the Publication documents until I found the one for ECE – the title was "On My Mind" and the URL was https://engineering.purdue.edu/Engr/AboutUs/News/Publications/EngineeringImpact/2010_1/ECE/manage_workspace).
     
  • Again, I copied the title, went back to the ECE window to add a reference. The main difference was that I had to check the URLs of the search results to make sure I was picking the correct "On My Mind."
     
  • Also, the Publication reference doesn't get added to the newsletter – the structure of the site finds it automatically by it's Id and displays it on the newsletter page.

Simple, eh?  ;-)

-Hilary