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I would like to submit an article for a review of James Kennard's Joomla! 1.5 Development Cookbook. I received a free copy from PackT, so I believe it's important to also disclose that in the piece, somehow, given the new US rules.

Would this be a welcome article? And, if so, how/where would you like submissions?

Thanks!
Amy

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http://Twitter.com/AmyStephen
http://www.alltogetherasawhole.org/

Sure that sounds like a great subject thanks!

Here's the current process for submitting articles:
Go to the sandbox site:
http://community.joomla.org/sandbox
Log in with your community username and password
Submit a new article there and save it to:
Section=Magazine
Category=Submitted Articles

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Paul Orwig
President, Open Source Matters

if you wish to use my recent articles as padding then please feel free

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Great thanks mandville!

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Paul Orwig
President, Open Source Matters

I would very much like to see an article or articles comparing the various CCKs now available. There has been such a flood of them in the last 12 months that it is hard to keep up and know the pros and cons of each one.

It would appear to me, that sooner or later, the average developer is going to have to make a choice as to which path one follows and some comparative guidelines would be an enormous help.

Cheers,

Ric

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Ric Raftis
http://bushsong.com.au

Thanks Ric, I agree that would be a good subject for either an article or series of articles which would be of interest to a lot of Joomla! users!

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Paul Orwig
President, Open Source Matters

So how do we get a community login?

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remember pillage...then burn.

Airton or I can create new user accounts, but I think a better process for those who don't already have one will be to manage that through the separate J! instance that the new magazine will be served from. Maybe we will create accounts there for authors, or maybe we will set up a process for uploading articles that doesn't require having an account.

So for you and others who don't have a user account, I'll ask that you stand by until we come up with a more permanent solution. We'll post an update in this forum (possibly a new thread) with whatever that process is.

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Paul Orwig
President, Open Source Matters

Okeydoke, standing around.

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remember pillage...then burn.

I'm with Bohn... Nathan Bohn. I have no community account yet either!

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Robert Vining
http://www.sobitemplates.com
http://twitter.com/RobertVining

Thinking out loud here - the one thing that was extremely time consuming before was formatting everyone's work.

If the Sandbox could be the place for "the army of writers" to work - and the actual Magazine site was the place for the Editor Team to stage the upcoming issues, then it's a bit easier to be liberal with access to the Sandbox. The big benefit with this is to get your Authors to do most of the article formatting.

Open Registration on the Sandbox You could have a thread in this forum area with a Sticky explaining that those who want to submit an Article must do two things: 1) create an ID on the Sandbox and 2) post in the thread as to what ID they used. Then moderate those registrations and only enable the ones that match a forum post. That should help you build a trusted group - and still open up writing to anyone.

Manager Access Enable new Sandbox IDs as Manager. That way, they have Administrator (Backend) access to the Sandbox. This is important so that they can use the environment to work on their articles over and over until the formatting and writing is ready for the next step. (Anything less than Manager is going to make your Authors dependent on you for changes, and that will create a backlog and lack of fun for the Editor Team.)

It would be explained to Authors in the Forum post that they are expected, of course, to only update their own work (unless asked for help) but the risk is low since it's the Sandbox. So, I wouldn't over worry. (If things get out of hand, we can create a very simple Plugin that does not save updates for changes made when the person updating doesn't match the creator - for those who are Managers and below.)

No Editor and White List - Now, this might sound like a radical thought - but it would be good to disable the editor on the Sandbox and use a very strict white list (p, h3, h4, h5, ul, ol, li, img, ?). That should prevent folks from picking their favorite font and using color font tags, etc., which can make it very hard to get a consistent look across all these articles. The plainer the Article, the better.

Code Highlighting - One of the more challenging - and important - editing needs is for Code Highlighting. So, thinking about which one will be used - and then providing good instructions to folks for how to markup their code examples, is also a good idea. (For example, if you use PHP tags or HTML, etc., you must change < to &lt;, etc. to get the code to present and not get filtered out, etc.)

Images - The final consideration is Images. Guidelines for authors on sizes of images, or quantities that will be allowed, is important.

Article Teaser - You might even require a specific length to the Intro Text.

Author Completion When an Author is done with their Article on the Sandbox, they could publish it. That could be a signal to the Editor Team that the Article is available for consideration of inclusion into an issue.

Editor Team
When it's selected by the Editor Team, it could be copied into the staging area (presumably a Category named after a specific issue?) on the actual magazine. Then, it should be deleted from the Sandbox. (Clear the queue and let the Author know further work will not be used.)

We had four individuals who agreed to help you and Dex as the Editor Team. I'd recommend getting that group talking about how they are going to manage the selection process - and then the workflow that follows the article submission. Having a nice team to do all of that work will be very helpful. It might be good to get some Templates together for arranging beautiful Article layouts. That's the type of thing that dawns on you when you are publishing articles - each page should be somewhat consistent - beautifully laid out - with a few different layouts for variety. When that is combined with Fotis's work, it's going to be drop dead gorgeous.

If I can help with any of this, please let me know. It's impressive how well this group is coming together so quickly.

Thanks!

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http://Twitter.com/AmyStephen
http://www.alltogetherasawhole.org/

Thanks Amy! This is a great post that touches on a lot of important "devil in the details" type stuff that we definitely need to figure out. I know your insights based on your work on the previous magazine will be a big help, and I would very much like you to help us with these issues. Here's my thoughts on the subjects you posted about...

Submitting Articles/Author's Work Area
I like the concept of a place for "the army of writers" to do their work, but since we got approval to set up a separate Joomla! instance for the magazine, I am not sure if the sandbox is the best place for that work. Here are my questions/concerns:
* The Community sandbox and production sites share the same db table for user ids. That doesn't mean we can't separate them, but at a minimum I need to check with others before moving forward with that.
* Because we may end up with a large number (army indeed!) of writers that come and go over time, if we could figure out a good way to automate the article submission process without requiring any account setup, that would be my preference. For example, what if we set up a "Submit Article" form in the magazine on a page that includes links to detailed style guide info such as what you've described. Then articles could be received without requiring an account to be setup. In this workflow, the "work area" would be the author's PC. The downside is your point about author re-work if formatting isn't up to standards, etc. One way to address that could be to just have editors send an email along the lines of "Thanks for submitting your article. Please revise your article so that it meets all of our published style guide standards, and then resubmit your article." I agree that the authors should be expected to do most of the formatting, but I hope that whatever workflow we use, that editors won't end up having to take a lot of time to repeatedly re-review and re-notify authors that their articles still need formatting work. As you say, no fun there.
* If we do end up having all authors register which also need to be approved by an admin, I wonder if it might make more sense to just let all that happen on the new Joomla! instance set up for the magazine? I would also like to hear from the Komrade team if they have any recommendations on how we should set this up.

Author Completion
The only concern I have with authors publishing an article somewhere (like the sandbox) that isn't in the production edition is if a search engine picks it up before the edition goes live and the author wanted his/her article to remain a surprise. I think the main thing here is to have a good way for editors to be notified when an article is ready to be edited.

No Editor/Code Highlighting/Images/Author Teaser
I like all of these ideas! To make them work I think we need to have a very detailed and specific style guide, but then I think having that is going to be very important anyway. I hope we will hear from Dex on these ideas.

Editor Team
I wasn't aware that there are others who have expressed interest to be editors, so that's good news. I do think the work will be easier if we have more editors. Can you contact them to see if they are still interested? Maybe we should set up an editor team thread for them to work through some of these issues?

Templates
IIRC, Fotis said Komrade would deliver multiple templates for different page types (front page, category, and article). If we want additional templates then I think we can either ask Komrade to help with that, or we can create them ourselves. I am all for variety as long as everything also ties together.

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Paul Orwig
President, Open Source Matters

add this to your robots.txt file on the sandbox install

Disallow: /index.php

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Robert Vining
http://www.sobitemplates.com
http://twitter.com/RobertVining

Great thanks Robert, that's a simple solution for that if we end up using that workflow!

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Paul Orwig
President, Open Source Matters

Yea, that's the piece I am worrying about. Not only was it a challenge with the Magazine, but before that, we used to have folks submit articles directly to the "News" environment - and then, it was really bad. :-P

Style Guides are good for the Magazine Team and are very good at enforcing consistency for presentation. The problem with having "the public" follow the Style Guide is it can be perceived as overwhelming, and they might just decide not to bother. Or, they thought they followed the Style Guide but since it's not programmatically checked, the Article still needs formatting (which is workload) or is rejected (which is unfortunate.)

This was the most difficult piece before. I suspect it's always the most difficult part.

It would be awesome if we could think of a way people could be guided by a system into automatically producing what is needed. Maybe we can create a Joomla! Extension they install locally so they can use it to create and review the article, and then submit it using cURL or something... Thinking, thinking...




These Leadership and Writing Team agreed to be a regular that "Editor Team." Half of them have posted in here, but half have not yet. The idea was that the team would help get the magazine produced each month -- both by helping write articles and also to help get other articles in shape. Dex, Jen, and Nicole have posted in. I'll ping the others. Having a regular and nice sized team will certainly help.

Leadership
- Dex Randall Joomla! Community Magazine Co-Editor
- Mike Moloney, Joomla! Community Magazine Co-Editor
- Paul Orwig, Joomla! Community Webmaster

Writing Team
- Chris Szabo
- Faisal Qureshi
- Jen Kramer
- Nicole Rhoads

Writers Pool (one article every other month)

Months: 01, 03, 05, 07, 09, 11
- Ahmad Alfy
- Mark W. Bender
- Rob Clayburn
- Wilco Jansen
- lafrance
- Ro McKernan
- Tim Stiffler-Dean
- Brian Teeman

Months: 02, 04, 06, 08, 10, 12
- Ron Chatman
- Brett Hooker
- Fotis Evangelou
- Jonathan Lackey
- Laura
- Júlio Pontes
- Amy Stephen
- Arlen Walker

It would be good to shut the Sandbox down from Search Engines, as Robert is suggesting.

Thanks Paul!

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http://Twitter.com/AmyStephen
http://www.alltogetherasawhole.org/

Paul, I don't think an article submission form specifically designed for this purpose is out of reach. Feel free to contact me about it and I can have a chat to some other people to see what we might be able to come up with.

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Brad Baker - Follow me on Google+
http://www.rochen.com - Joomla! Hosting, the correct way.
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^Now with Joomla 2.5 and Joomla 3.0 Tutorials

For those who are unfamiliar, could we have forum names to match the RL names please

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I suggest for the sake of good order, Paul, Mark and Dex who are currently looking after this initiative be the ones to 'manage' the people involved. If we all start to chip in, we're going to have upset people and disorder.

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Brad Baker - Follow me on Google+
http://www.rochen.com - Joomla! Hosting, the correct way.
http://www.joomlatutorials.com <-- Joomla Help & Tutorials
^Now with Joomla 2.5 and Joomla 3.0 Tutorials

Thanks for sharing from your previous experience on this Amy. My first reaction is that I am comfortable with the idea that following the style guide should simply be part of the expectation for authors to be published in the J!CM. I do agree that in those cases "rejected" would be unfortunate. If we take the "hard line" approach to style guide adherence, we should definitely invite them to re-submit if they are willing to reformat their article. Maybe we could come up with a really thorough tutorial including examples that would make this easier, or a template with comments that authors could download and fill in?


That would be sweet if we could come up with an extension like that. I am also wondering if we could define some content types within K2 to help simplify at least some of those style elements (title, byline, etc.).


Okay great thanks for clarifying that and for pinging these others.

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Paul Orwig
President, Open Source Matters

@Mandville - Many of those folks have posted in to this section already. Basically, what Paul and I were trying to do is make certain there is a good transition into the forums so that everyone who wanted to contribute knows where to go and how to get involved. Eventually, that preliminary list will go away as the "real team" emerges. It has been since October and some might have lost interest or gotten busy, etc. So, eventually, all the forum IDs will be in this area. Not sure how to get those now, to be honest, and it might not matter if they don't join in.

Brad - I think it's going nicely with folks chipping in. It's good to remind people of whom is in charge, though, so that it's clear. Paul's doing a super job responding to everyone and I think it's very positive so far.

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http://Twitter.com/AmyStephen
http://www.alltogetherasawhole.org/

Great thanks Brad! Give us some more time to discuss this some more and think this through so we can have some clear requirements if this is the direction we decide to take. I think input from the K2/Komrade team might also be helpful with this part as well. For example maybe we can define different elements in the article submission form that would map to K2 content types, with the goal of automating as much of the styling as possible

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Paul Orwig
President, Open Source Matters

Yea, we'll probably just have to see how that goes. I don't disagree. Wishing for magic pixie dust, I think. If you just avoid Google Docs, you'll save pulling hair out, so that's good.


Not a problem. I think if people haven't responded by the end of the month, we can assume they moved on. They can always jump in later, too.

Thanks Paul - it's looking very promising. Appreciate your efforts here!

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http://Twitter.com/AmyStephen
http://www.alltogetherasawhole.org/

It was something along these lines i mean just so people can relate to and get familiar with them

[*]- Paul Orwig = porwig
[*]- Mark W. Bender = onthemarkdesign
[*]- Jen Kramer = Jen Kramer


PS who stole your avatar?

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Un requested Help PM's will be added to the foe list and possibly just deleted
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Hi guys, after a "hit" by Amy Stephen I would like to submit the same article I've shared on alltogetherasawhole:

http://www.alltogetherasawhole.org/prof ... for-search

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www.odino.org: SEO and PHP tutorials first

Hi odino, thanks for submitting your article! I think it's a great subject that readers of the magazine will be very interested in. Your explanations are very straightforward and including images of the pages as viewed by Lynx is very helpful to understanding the subject as well.

When we progress with the magazine's development where we are ready to formally accept article submissions, I will contact you about formally submitting your article.

Thanks again!

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Paul Orwig
President, Open Source Matters

thanks, lynx is not equal to a spider (which translates pages to 100% flat text) but gives you a general idea about organizing elements and give them relevance

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www.odino.org: SEO and PHP tutorials first

Great idea! keep it up. Waiting for further updates.

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Please read forum rules regarding the use of signatures: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=65

The information that you seek is out there on a search engine somewhere. Just type in publishers, then narrow your search to the field that you are interested in. Good luck.

Hi Guys,

I thought that my post on a JUG South Western Ontario Meeting (and the amazing meeting space) might be a fun article for Joomla! Magazine. I'm not sure if you want the magazine to be the primary content source though (the article is already published on my blog). What do you think?

http://cartanova.ca/green-community-blo ... st-ontario

Thanks,
Andrew H.

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