Products.PressRoom 3.11

Allows users to instantly create a polished, professional press room, featuring press releases, press clips and press contacts. Manage an online Press Room within your Plone site.

Introduction

Press Room is a simple add-on product which can be used to easily manage an online Press Room within your Plone site. It adds 4 new content types to your Plone site including a Press Release, a Press Clip (i.e. an outside news piece), and a Press Contact (someone who might be available to speak to the press.)

It also provides a Press Room, a folderish content type with a nice default view and some automatically created folders and Collections (aka Smart Folders) to help you organize and present your press materials.

Some press rooms we observed in making this product are found at microsoft.com, intel.com, nrdc.org, sierraclub.org, and google.com. Our goal was to make something suitable for many kinds of organizations, including nonprofits, businesses, educational institutions, and more.

Features

Press Releases

• Headline

• Subheadline

• Release date & timing

• Location

• Image

• Related press contacts (see below)

• Related content items elsewhere on your site

Press Clips

Published media stories about your organization or of general interest.

• Date of story

• Publication

• Reporter

• Excerpted text

• Hyperlink to original story

Press Contacts

People with whom reporters can follow up. Press Contacts can be associated with Press Releases.

• Name

• Description

• Job Title

• Email Address

• City

• State/Province

• Organization

• Phone number

Press Room provides a master “Press Room” view showing a configurable number of Releases, Clips and Contacts (any of which can also be hidden).

Press Room also makes available RSS feeds of Press Releases and Press Clips.

Press Rooms in Action

• People for Puget Sound

• Conservation Northwest

• Sierra Club of BC

• Ecojustice Canada

Current Status of Press Room

This release of PressRoom has been tested with Plone 2.5.5, Plone 3.3.2, and Plone 4.0b1. We assume it will work for most Plone releases 2.5 through 4.0b1. If you have a Plone 2.1 site, please see the PressRoom 1.1 line. We are committed to supporting the two most current Plone releases at a time.

Known bugs and issues are listed at http://plone.org/products/pressroom/issues

Suggestions welcome! (Code even more welcome!)

Roadmap: http://plone.org/products/pressroom/roadmap

Installation

Install in the usual way, by:

• Adding the Products.PressRoom egg to your buildout

• Browse to your plone site –> site setup –> add/remove products

• Click install (or you can use the QuickInstaller tool in the Zope Management Interface)

Usage

We recommend creating a Press Room object in the root of your site. Then begin creating Press Releases, Press Clips and Press Contacts in your Press Room.

The “Add Press (item)” links in the Press Room will shortcut you to subfolders intended to store these items. Only items stored in their appropriate subfolder will be shown in the Press Room view.

You may create Press Releases, Clips and Contacts elsewhere in your site, but these will not be shown in the Press Room view.

You might find it useful to suppress the ability to add normal News Items if Press Room replaces that need. You can do that by going into the portal_types tool in the ZMI and unchecking “implicitly addable” for News Items.

Note that in Plone 3.0+, the infrastructure supporting each Press Room by default is created as “private”. The Press Room provides a button to publish all of these. That button will NOT publish any actual Releases, Clips or Contacts – just the folders that contain them and the Collections that aggregate them.

Upgrading Folders

As of Press Room 3.2, the containers for Press Clips and Press Releases are Large Plone Folders. Before 3.2, Press Room used normal folders, which become inefficient when containing more than about a hundred items. To upgrade an older Press Room, navigate to the Press Room and append “/@@upgrade-folders” to the url. A message will return with the results of the upgrade. Note that your Press Room subfolders must retain their original ids (‘press-clips’ and ‘press-releases’) in order to be upgraded.

Note also that, by default, Large Plone Folders are not normally addable in a Plone site. To allow the creation of the two used in a new Press Room, we briefly enable them (if they weren’t already) and after adding them, we disable them again. That means that attempts to rename them will cause a cryptic error about disallowed types. To get around that, simply navigate to portal_types in the ZMI, click into Large Plone Folders, and check the “Implicitly addable” checkbox.

In Plone 4, standard folders are BTree-based and can better handle large numbers of items, so Large Plone Folders are no longer used. Folders that were already upgraded to Large Plone Folders in Plone 3 can remain that way.

Credits

Press Room was designed and created by Groundwire (formerly ONE/Northwest) (http://www.onenw.org), with contributions from:

• Trey Beck - [e-mail]

• Andrew Burkhalter - [e-mail]

• Johnpaul Burbank - [e-mail]

• Jon Stahl - [e-mail]

• Jon Baldivieso - [e-mail]

• David Glick - [e-mail]

• naro - i18n work, Czech translation

• Thanks to Green Media Toolshed (http://www.greenmediatoolshed.org) for advice on nomenclature.

History

3.11 (2010-09-21)

• Fix normalizeString usage in Plone 3. [davisagli]

3.10 (2010-09-16)

• Avoid running the final import step except as part of the PressRoom profile. [davisagli]

3.9 (2010-??-??)

• Made folder_listing_pressroom template Plone 4 compatible. [yomatters]

3.8 (2010-07-23)

• Made Press Room draw on collections for content. [yomatters]

3.7 (2010-07-16)

• Fixed invalid TAL. [davisagli]

3.6 (2010-07-16)

• Use a forward-compatible way of checking isViewTemplate. [davisagli]

3.5 (2010-07-16)

• Use context.portal_workflow instead of wtool in templates. [davisagli]

3.4 (2010-07-16)

• Fix some missing global variables in Plone 4. [davisagli]

3.3 (2010-03-09)

• Make PressRoom compatible with Plone 4, TinyMCE. [nvasseur, davisagli]

3.2-final

• Fixed handling of the PressRoom add permission for contributors and in the main pressroom view shortcut links. [davisagli]

• Fixed a Unicode bug in vCard download [naro]

• more translation work [naro, tabacha]

3.2-beta-2

• Fixed the German translations to really be German. [jbaldivieso]

3.2-beta-1

• Switched to Large Plone Folders for storing Press Releases and Clips. Provided a migration script for upgrading older Press Rooms. (This was Roadmap item #3.) [jbaldivieso]

• Returned Press Contacts for purposes of press room presentation in the order in which they’re stored in the press-contacts folder. [jbaldivieso]

• Added German translation, thanks to Sven Anders [jbaldivieso]

• Added Publication to pressroom_view listing of Press Clips [jonstahl]

• Changed date & publication spans in pressrom_view to divs [jonstahl]

• Removed “Up one folder” from Press Room subfolder views [jonstahl]

• Made CSS not conditional on pressroom types (it was hard to style pressroom subfolders, which aren’t custom types; also it’s more efficient to have that readily combinable with other stylesheets in the Resource Registry) [jonstahl]

3.1

• Added basque translation [erral]

• Fixed an upgrade error (issue #42) and the i18n coverage in pressroom_view (issue #43).

• Added a cell phone field to press contacts. Enhanced the way they are displayed throughout the Press Room (issue #11). Also Press Contacts can be downloaded as vCards for use in address books/email clients. [jbaldivieso]

3.0

• moved pressroom_view logic into view [jbaldivieso]

• bifurcated the pressroom_content skin directory into 2.5 and 3.0 versions to support KSS in 3.0 sites [jbaldivieso]

• moved as much of the initialization into GenericSetup as possible, without sacrificing normal quickinstaller-based installation in Plone 2.5. [jbaldivieso]

• created a workaround for PressRooms created using the new Simple Publication WF. Users are warned if the releases/clips/contacts folders are private, and a button is provided to publish the pressroom, the three subfolders, and their respective Collections. [jbaldivieso]

1.1

• Italian translation file [rlemmi - thanks!]

• Corrected help text on press clip publication [jonstahl]

• Moved press clip description above byline [jonstahl]

• Nicer handling of link to press clip original story. [jonstahl]

• Added uninstall method to remove PR cruft. [jbaldivieso]

• Made master Press Room view listing of contacts respect contacts’ order in the contacts folder [jonstahl]

• added i18n for the plone domain (content type names) and fixed translation in the Press room default subfolder titles and descriptions

• added i18n in pressroom domain, added Czech translation [naro - thanks!]

• removed condition on pressroom_folder_listing that prevented bylines from being shown to anonymous users [jonstahl]

• added i18n tags to page templates [jonstahl]

1.0.3

• Changed the id on the created press contact smart folder from “roster” to “press-contacts” due to the former being a reserver id within the context of a member folder. Fixes issue #26 [andrewb]

• Changing some tests that were based on the assumption that we were ordering catalog results on effective rather than the more logical storydate and releaseDate schema fields [andrewb]

• Adding test coverage to prove that a storydate and releaseDate should be required on the PressRelease & PressClip content types due to the sorting that’s done in the default catalog queries [andrewb]

• Making storydate and releaseDate required fields within the schema declaration per the testing coverage in the previous line [andrewb]

• The “More press clips/release” text only shows up when there actually are more of those items [andrewb]

• Removed trailing slashes in links from main press room and press room subfolder views [jonstahl]

• Added | between email and phone number for press contacts [jonstahl]

• Spam-protected email adddress of press contacts [jonstahl]

• Changed CSS selector for press contacts from #press-contacts to #press-contacts-box to resolve conflict with auto-generated listing in folder_contents [jonstahl]

1.0.2

• Fixed a missing global define. [jonstahl]

1.0.1

• Fixed dumb tab issue. [jonstahl]

1.0 final

• Fixed smart folder index fields to include getReleaseDate and getStoryDate

1.0 beta

• Subclassed ATFolder instead of OrderedBaseFolder so that display menu works properly [jonstahl]

• Added views for clip, release, contact folders [burbank]

0.8.1

• Resolved compatibility issues with LinguaPlone and PressRoom due to subclassing of i18N-unaware type for the PressRoom type

0.8

• Initial release to plone.org products area (CHANGES regime not in place so do the following: “svn diff –verbose -r 23865:27132” against the collective repository to determine what has changed)

0.1

• Initial release and migration to Collective