News module needs serious work

[stopsatgreen]

I hope this doesn't seem overly critical, as I genuinely appreciate the hard work that the dev community has put into CMSMS, and it's an excellent piece of software in many regards.

One thing that I think lets it down slightly is the News module; as far as I can tell, it's not had any significant work done on it since I started using version 0.6.

It badly needs pagination, both in the CMS itself and on the pages. I have a site which publishes a news story every day and has been live for almost six months now, and there is a huge delay and call on the database when you go to the Articles page as it pulls out six months worth of stories. I know there are hacks here on the forum for client-side pagination, but I would have hoped these would have been integrated into the code by now.

There is no way to assign multiple categories to an article (unless a hack has been written, but that's not an ideal solution); you can't manage mutliple templates via the module itself; no way to change ownership of an article; to reorder stories you have to adjust all the dates.

Some of these seem like minor issues, but many have been feature requests for over a year.

I realise that CMSMS can be different things to different users, but News is a core module and doesn't seem to have been given half the attention that other areas have. There are some changes planned for the 1.1 release, but as my host doesn't have PHP5 I won't even be able to use them, whatever they are!

Please don't take this as baseless criticism; I'm a happy user of CMSMS but this module has been the cause of most of the headaches I've encountered while using it, and I think that improvements here would benefit the perception of the project as a whole. If my PHP skills were better I'd offer to get involved myself!

I hope that this will spark discussion and thought, rather than beeing seen as a rant.

[Vin]

What else to say? If only someone had the time to reply besides me... currently fighting with the news module, the pagination is documented in quite a lousy way...