Promo/Dot/Drupal

This is a guide primarily for Dot editors. However, when submitting an article via the Dot form or by email you can make the editors' job easier (and get your article published more quickly) by formatting it in the way described under "Dot HTML" below.

Drupal

When you log in as an editor, you can see what is in the queue by visiting:

http://dot.kde.org/admin/content/node

To create a new article choose 'Create Content' from the right hand side panel in the Dot home page.

You always want to create a 'Story' in the page that comes next.

For each article you will see a 'View' tab and an 'Edit' tab (you go straight in to the editor when you create a new story following the steps above).

The editor has the following fields (some need to be expanded before you can see all the options):

• Title (text box)
• Dot Catergories (dropdown list)
• Body (test box)
• Input format (collapsed by default)
  • Filtered HTML radio button
  • Full HTML radio button
• Lanugage (dropdown list)
• Menu settings (tab)
  • Menu link title (text box)
  • Parent item (dropdown list)
  • Weight (dropdown list)
• Authoring Information (tab)
  • Authored by (text box)
  • Authored on (text box)
• Revision Information (tab)
  • Create new revision (check box)
  • Log message (text box)
• Publishing options (tab)
  • Published (check box)
  • Promoted to front page (check box)
  • Sticky at top of lists (check box)
• File attachments (tab)
  • Currently attached files
  • Attach new file (button)
• URL path settings (tab)
  • Automatic alias (check box)
  • Text box to set custon alias
• Comment settings
  • Disabled (radio button)
  • Read only (radio button)
  • Read/write(radio button)

Title

This should be snappy and try and include the main point of the story or something to draw in the reader:

Bad: KDevelop 4.1 Released Good: KDevelop 4.1 Brings Git Integration

Titles should be in title case- i.e. the first letter of all words except cojugations ('and', 'of' etc) are capitalised.

Dot Categories

Try and choose the most appropriate one. This is more of an art than a science.

Body

The article - more on this under the HTML section below

Input Format

Most of the time you'll want to change this to 'Full HTML'. It is always fine to set it to full HTML, but on occasion for very simple articles 'Filtered HTML' might work too. If the article looks wrong when you preview it, you probably forgot to change this.

'Filtered HTML' is default so that people posting comments are limited in what they can do.

Language

Always leave this as 'Language neutral'

Menu Settings

Do not touch anything in here

Authoring information

Put in the author's user name. If the submission came via the Dot form then this is included in the email to the list. Otherwise you can use the Dot search form to search for the user name. You'll see matches as you type.

The time field you normally leave blank, then it is filled in with the time that you submit the whole form. Generally when you publish the article, you want to make this field blank so that it is published with the publication time/date rather than the article creation time/date

Revision Information

We normally don't bother with making separate revisions. However, if you are making major changes that you or someone else might want to revert then tick this box and describe the revision to identify it.

Publishing Options

These are the bits that determine when and how the article becomes public. Ticking 'Published' allows anyone with the correct URL to see the article. It also lets Google and other search engines see the article, so it should not be used until the article is fully published. However, ticking 'Published' does not make the article visible on the Dot front page - 'Promoted to front page' does that. So if someone on the list asks you to 'publish' an article, they mean tick both 'Published' and 'Promoted to front page'

We rarely use 'Sticky at the top of lists'. It is really only used if there is a very big announcement that should stay on top for a few days. Generally in that case we don't publish other articles for a few days, rather than have them appear second or third on the list - so discuss on the mailing list before using this.

File Attachments

Pretty self explanatory. We do not tend to tick any of the 'list' checkboxes. If you upload two files withe the same name, Drupal will append '_0', '_1' etc to the file names.

Tip: if you are using Konqui (with KHTML, not sure about WebKit) then you can type the address to a remote file directly in to the file chooser dialog, rather than having to download it to your system first.

URL Path Settings

You almost certainly do not want to change this. The only exception would be if you accidentally publish with the wrong date or a typo in the title and want to correct that without breaking incoming links (that are syndicated in RSS, Identi.ca, Facebook etc within a few minutes of publishing). If I remember correctly, this option is only available to administrators.

Comment Settings

No need to change this - always leave it at Read/Write