Monday, February 12, 2007

Tweaking Brausch' Munius Article Moderation Script

The James D. Brausch Munius Article Directory Software PHP scripts are a pretty slick article gathering mechanism to get content from others for your e-commerce or other website. But there are few rough edges, necessitating a few tweaks I've found desirable.

Update 2009-06-18: I no longer am an affiliate for this product, and no longer recommend it.

One if them was derived as follows: When a contributor submits an article, he is supposed to select an appropriate category from the drop-down "Article Category" select menu on the submission form. But generally, they just leave it as whatever your default is -- usually just "General".

Then, when you go to moderate, and you want to accept the article, and want to put it into a more appropriate category, you have to manually type something in. I don't know about you, but my memory is not so good, so I don't necessarily remember exactly all the category items and their spellings. (If you type in a category incorrectly, it won't show in any category to users -- only to you in moderation mode.) Anyway, I figured I needed a drop-down select menu in the moderating (article reviewing) page.

Browsing around the Munius scripts, I found the menu for contributors in "submitarticle.php". (Lines 21-37 of the original Brausch script I have.)

Copying that into "reviewarticle.php" and making a few modifications to that gets and displays what the contributor originally selected, then allows you/me (moderator) to select either that or a new category. (The code linked to below replaces lines 42-45 of the original Brausch script in "reviewarticle.php".)

See http://www.e-commerce-biz.com/code/munius-select-menu.txt for the code.

1 comment:

  1. The drop down worked great! Thanks.

    - Chuck

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