phpWebLog

The best idea I can think of would be to have two textarea fields on the contribute news page where the contributor is allowed to post a summary and a story. If no summary is entered, it uses the entire story on the front page.

One other idea would be to have a boolean in the config which allows you to enable/disable summaries all together. Then all contributed stories just get posted on the front page, and you click "more" to read the comments.

I don't really know the best way to handle this since everyone has different needs.

I prefer the first idea as sometimes one wants a summary, sometimes they do not. Also, having the dual textarea boxes allows one to have the summary identical to the first part of the story OR actually make it a summary. IMHO, this is the best way to accomodate everyone and is done as per story. Nice.

So many little variables here. Let's say one doesn't want to have the summary post on the stories page, just the story itself. OR let's say someone uses the "summary" box as the beginning of the story or ... So many options. This is a good example of how the XML template system comes to play, we can customize it ourselves. Like for the stories.php , I use summary as a summary :

echo "$summary

$story";

Or if it's the beginning of a story :

echo "$summary $story";

This is simular to the boolean route but allows more customizability as in my template I might do this :

echo "$summary

$story";

Hmm. .

Philip

Have 2 boxes - summary and story. If the story is empty, then just display the summary.

If the story isnt empty, then display the summary with a link saying "Read more" to read the summary and story.