News Channel “Cloud” Component
Recently, I was working on a news component to generate a “cloud” of News Channels in our Intranet to allow our users to navigate our news articles with ease. The “first draft” worked nicely - It generated a list of news channels from the system based on a users permissions and put them into a styled infobox - nice.
Having put this into the Claromentis Component Library, it was suggested by Nigel that we take this one step further… to modify the component code, allowing users to add in some additional parameters and generate a more commonly known tag cloud, including randomization of the results returned, with varying font sizes depending on the most popular channels - now we’re talking!
After some code changes and some input from Dan at Claromentis, the component was modified to generate something that looks a little something like this:
The view can be changed by editing the user parameters on the component code as mentioned above.
To view a full description of the coponent and how to implement it, see here: http://www.claromentis.com/wiki/components:news_cloud
Until next time,
Craig
Hi Craig - I’m from the Australian branch, so first of all, welcome! Quickly, we’re a big fan of the concept of news channels and will certainly be using this new code with a couple of our clients.
One question though - where are you displaying this information? Just on the homepage?
I have another question (Sorry!)
I imagine we are varying the font according to the number of posts in the channel - which is very useful.
Is it possible to vary it according to the number of subscribers instead? So the most popular according to the users, instead of the most active in terms of posts?
Rob,
This component is not a smart object, so can be shown on any page in exception of publish pages at present (through template editing)
Regards,
Dan Munn
Nigel,
In response to your questions - It would be possible, however would need updating to include relevant subscription information into query - from there, it’d need to do the math calculation on those figures instead of using the total number of posts by channel. In that particular instance you could wrap an if based on a parameter, returning a different query object to run through the database - if you kept the naming convention on the count() operation uniformed, it’d allow you to run the same math procedure just using different a different query to form the basis for the figures.
Regards,
Dan Munn
Hi Rob,
Thanks for adding the comments Dan, I fully agree with you. Rob, the News Channel Cloud is a component so can be embedded anywhere in the system as Dan has said already.
Its nice to know that customers will be making use of the component!
Best Regards,
Craig