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Preliminary Brainstorming for Issues Module:

Overview The Issues module’s most basic functionality is to keep a record of separate issues for a periodical with which individual Drupal nodes can be associated. This would serve to associate all pieces of content from that issue with a single issue and allow for the entire issue to be displayed at once. Details

• Types of issues:

  • Standard:

    • Volume Number

    • Issue Number

    • Date of Publication

  • Special:

    • Issue Name (e.g. Election 2010 Special Issue)

    • Date of Publication

  • Other considerations:

    • In Print (boolean)

      • Offer a checkbox to signify whether the node appeared in print within the associated issue, and offer the option (in Admin area) of automatically displaying a message under each article that says “A version of this article originally appeared in print on December 20th, 2010 [in Issue No. 49 of Volume 127].”

    • Multiple Issues

      • Some pieces of content are re-published in multiple issues. At least for reference it can be useful to associate a node with multiple issues.

      • In this case perhaps a primary issue should be selected, or the earlier issue is automatically selected as primary in order to determine what should be shown at bottom (in case of display text like above) and/or what should be used for related/supplementary content that depends on the issue.

• Additional Features

  • From This Issue Block

    • A block can be made available for node pages to display additional content from the same issue as the node that is being viewed.

    • This block should be configurable to be restricted to only the content type that is being displayed or all content types. (e.g. Other News from December 20th, 2010)

  • Issue Page

    • Offer an issue page that displays a simple list of stories

    • Options:

      • Weighting - can we take weighting into account? (v1.5 / 2)

      • Can we offer admin options to break the issue page into sections based on Content Type? (v1.5 / 2)

      • Styling - can we offer tie-ins with any layout modules that exist (v2)