The WGBH.org Development Blog

Apologies to all of our loyal readers who were disappointed by the lack of a post last week (that’s you mom!). See, I was on a family vacation at an undisclosed location working on my farmers tan and spending just about every last cent we had in the bank to entertain the wife and kids.

It was a good time that unfortunately had to end, so now this week I’ve been back at it, closing in on the launch of our new TV Programs and Schedules module. Whilst I was gone Pete was busy fielding bug reports and questions from our testing team. The good news is there seem to be relatively few actual bugs. The code is pretty solid and we are plowing forward getting the production environment ship shape in preparation for launch!

However, that does not mean we are without issues.

One issue that I knew would come up eventually has already come to the surface, a bit earlier than I had figured on. It has do with modifying published content and previewing pages that contain information from multiple nodes, like our episode pages, for example.

See, our current site and CMS have lots of flaws and unsightly blemishes, but one thing it is good at is allowing content producers (CPs) to create multiple revisions of a page or content item, publish one revision and continue to tweak the content without overwriting the published version until the appropriate time. Also, our current site has very sophisticated previewing functionality, allowing CPs to preview just about any given page to see unpublished changes, including the ability to preview by date, showing what the page will look like at a future date, based on scheduled publish and expiration dates for content items.

Know what I mean?

Drupal, natively, doesn’t seem to do either of these things particularly well. Or, if it does, I still haven’t figured it out. Oh sure, you can configure content types to allow multiple revisions, but all that really does is archive earlier revisions of a node, in case you want to roll back later. That’s good, don’t get me wrong, but what we need is the ability to publish a revision, then create a new revision that isn’t published until we say so. We can sort of use the current functionality to do this. You could publish a node, update it and create a new revision (which immediately publishes the new revision), then revert back to the original revision and roll it forward when we want the new revision to be live. However (a) that’s an annoying number of steps and (b) you can only edit the currently published revision. Not so useful.

I recently played with the Revision Moderation module, which gets us closer to what we need. Basically, that module will create a new revision for you without publishing it until a user with the proper permissions chooses to. However, we’ve decided not to implement it now because the code for Drupal 6 isn’t even in alpha state yet and also because there seem to be issues with one user seeing the unpublished revision created by another user, etc. etc.

As for previewing, our new episode pages are fairly complex and draw on content from multiple nodes and content types (e.g. program descriptions, episode info, related content boxes, etc.). The problem they’re having is that they need to modify some pieces of content on a published episode page and, in doing so, need the ability to preview their work in the context of the page in order to get the layouts right. Right now there is no easy way to do that. The preview functionality provided by Drupal on the node edit pages is fine, but it doesn’t allow CPs to preview, say, right hand rail content boxes in the full context of an episode page.

What we really need is the ability to look at a published page and pass in a preview flag, which would then display the latest (potentially unpublished) revisions of the nodes on the page. Even better, this preview functionality should allow for a date parameter, which would then also take account of Scheduler publish and expiration dates.

Now tell me that that wouldn’t be sweet!

Anyhow, I knew this would be an issue sooner or later, but chose to put off dealing with it for the TV Programs and Schedules module. However, as we look to rebuild the whole rest of the WGBH.org and move everything to Drupal, we will have to come up with a better solution. In the future, our home page will be made up of view lists of content boxes, each of which could have its own publish and expiration date, multiple revisions, etc. Being able to properly preview the page will be key for us…

Any ideas? Let’s hear em.