How do I control and manage my authors/stories/deadlines?

June 26, 2006 4:03 AM

Is there a software to help an Editor to manage the authors, assignments and deadlines of a website?

I'm the Editor of a website about technology, we're migrating to Drupal soon, leaving Movable Type and the "blog" shadow. We have 5 or 6 regular authors plus a dozen colaborators.

I harvest data from mySQL to find who's writing more, who's generating more comments, etc, but it's a manual procedure. Also I use plain old spreadsheets to follow who's doing what, sugest stories, etc.

Point is: It takes a lot of time, and all the feedback from the authors is manual.

I tried all the top Project softwares, but they're too generic, I need something crafted to editorial work.

Is there such a package or it's time to stop complaining and start coding?

posted by cardoso to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I've written and modded Drupal modules and I can tell you: it's fairly simple. If you can't find a module that does what you want (for example this looks related but overkill), start off from something that's close and hack it to do what you want. Alternatively, there seems to be a good-sized community around Drupal coding, you may be able to offer a fixed-price for what you want and have someone code it for you --which may worth your while, depending on how much time you're gonna save.
posted by costas at 5:35 AM on June 26, 2006

If you have any php and mysql experience, it should be just a couple hours of work to write a page for you that does the counts and wordcounts and whatever else you do by hand.

If you've never programmed it, if you simply make up a list of tools you need ("I like to check on the frequency that an author posts an article, which I like to be 4.2 posts/day average") and hand that to a programmer along with a copy of the database, it should be short work to whip up a page that will give you those statistics. It's probably only a couple hundred bucks in expensive programmer time, much cheaper if you try one of those services like elance.
posted by mathowie at 5:54 AM on June 26, 2006

Also it seems that a few projects have been started and fizzled out along the lines of something similar. Perhaps by searching through the forum there you can excite people to work further on making a module.
posted by gomichild at 5:58 AM on June 26, 2006

Response by poster: I'll check the workflow module, Costas, does not look like overkill at all.

About the stats, Mathowie, I have the queries, but even as a module they're not as integrated as I'd like them to be.
posted by cardoso at 6:14 AM on June 26, 2006