Revo: UncosNews

If you haven’t come across UncosNews yet I would definitely suggest that it is worth looking over. I originally ran across it in this Sal Sodano forum post and have begun testing it in our MODx sandbox.

What has me really excited about this is that it successfully addresses a fundamental issue of developing MODx sites. I am a big fan of the MODx document tree. I believe that it gives the developer and the end user common ground, a shared perspective of how a site is organized. But, when a set of documents grows too large, as with a Calendar or News section, the document tree can become unwieldy. MODx developers need an alternative like UncosNews. I have also been following MxCalendar, which takes a similar approach but do not believe that it is available yet for Revo.

7 Comments. Posted by on Monday, June 13, 2011 at 9:08 am.

Filed under CMS, Development.

  • Tlyczko

    can one display a WordPress tyle “Archives” list by month with UncosNews??
    like with Archivist???

  • http://www.gregorysmart.com Gregory Smart

    Not that I am seeing. I see this as a good starting point, but there are lots of items on the wish list. You might suggest this on that forum post.

  • http://www.michael-van-laar.de Michael van Laar

    Sounds really interesting. I had no time to check it out yet. Does UnscoNews use TinyMCE for editing the main text of a news item?

  • http://www.gregorysmart.com Gregory Smart

    Actually I noticed it uses another editor and wasn’t really sure what I thought about it using an editor other than the MODx default.

  • zC

    I know this is kinda old but I’m just getting into UncosNews. From what i can tell, it looks like a great snippet. I have a client that could really use this tool on their site so I’m playing around with it on my localhost. Prob is, the backend isn’t showing up for some reason. I’ve created several test entries using the UncosNews form and each time when I submit the form, the application just loads forever and ever. I refresh the screen and it still doesn’t show the entries, however, if I go to a page where I have the [[!UncosNews]] code running, there they are just as I entered them. So, at this point, something is working right but I don’t have any way to edit or remove the stories, if need be.

    What can you think of would cause the UncosNews manager that runs on the backend (i.e., when logged into the MODx admin) not to show news entries? I appreciate any help you can give.

  • http://www.gregorysmart.com Gregory Smart

    It’s been a while for me and I haven’t used UncosNews a lot. I would probably refer you to the forums. You can also try twitter, there are a lot of helpful folks there, use #modx.

  • zC

    I appreciate that… thanks! If you don’t mind me asking, what technique/tool do you recommend for something of a news publishing site. Nothing to the level of WashPost or NYTimes or anything. It’s a Web site supporting a sports talk show and from time to time they post game previews/reviews, commentary on stuff going on in the league, etc. It’s around 30-40 pages right now but as they continue with these stories (typically updated once or twice a week), it will begin to grow pretty big. I thought about initially just letting them use the stock document editing feature that comes with MODx but I figured I’d play around with it and if I could find something that would support lots of pages that I could implement now instead of later, that would be great. Thats when I found out about UncosNews but unfortunately, there hasn’t been much mention about it online and on the MODx forums. I know with Evo, people recommended using Ditto and some other snippets in tandem but with me trying out the newer Revo instead, I figured I’d opt for the latest, greatest instead of the tried and true.

    But I will continue to look around and on Twitter as you said. There’s got to be a simple solution. I just don’t have the programming experience to find it on my own without bursting a brain vein… LOL.

    Thanks for your help!