Forum:News functionality

I'm not that keen on blogs as such, but I think they're pretty good as a newsposting functionality. Thanks to this, e.g. fan wikis could rival other fansites also as news sources. I'm currently testing news through the blog listing function at The Vault (Fallout wiki): w:c:fallout:The Vault:News. It's working fine, but I think it could use some improvements.

For one, I think that there should be a separate News: namespace set up for news articles, using mostly the same code as the blogs already do, but with the following differences:


 * News articles could be set to be editable by anyone
 * Instead of pages like User_blog:Ausir/Point Lookout released, we'd have cleaner looking "News:Point Lookout released"
 * Instead of linking back to the user blog as a subpage, all news articles would link back to the main news page. Currently all news are still treated as part of a user's blog
 * An option to show an image thumbnail in the news summary would also be neat, and add some color to the main news/blog pages
 * The ability to move and/or copy blog posts to the news namespace (unlike manual copypaste, this would retain the original posting date and history, copy and not just move so that the user could keep it on his blog while the same post is also copied to news) - this would also allow us to transfer older news from the blog namespace to the new news namespace.
 * Separate RSS feed

I also think simply "submitting news" would be easier and more intuitive to most users than making a blog post and adding it to the news category. Ausir 00:39, 2 July 2009 (UTC)