Creating a News article before a News room doesn't work - leading to user frustration?

[budda]

As a new microsites user if i jump in and create my first news article and try to save it (even as a draft) the form validation rejects until i select a "newsroom".

If i then create a newsroom node in another tab successfully and then jump back to the news article i wrote and try to save again the newsroom drop down doesn't pick up the newly created newsroom option to select.

Creating a new news article node does show the new newsroom - but now i need to copy n paste everything over.

Solution ideas

• If no newsrooms are set up flag sa warning at the top of the news article node to alert the editor before they start.
• In the newsroom select validation error provide a link to the newsroom node add form and do "something" to refresh the options afterwards on the news article form.
• On new news article redirect to new newsroom node form if one doesn't already exist (maybe a little confusing without some on page explanation of the process)
• Set up a default newsroom catchall as part of the profile install

[stephen-cox]

When installing news in LocalGov Drupal we used to automatically create a Newsroom, but this was removed with: https://github.com/localgovdrupal/localgov_news/commit/0ad2b0bfbfeaae0abe6be78960e72d0afac7da0f. It wouldn't work with Microsites anyway as we don't necessarily want a Newsroom on every site.

With Blogs, that follow a similar pattern, a warning message is displayed when trying to create a blog post when there are no blog channels; https://github.com/localgovdrupal/localgov_blogs/blob/1.x/localgov_blogs.module#[L144-L147]

We should be doing this as a minimum.

[willguv]

I’m thinking about the equivalent behaviour on Wordpress. On install it creates a page which surfaces blog posts.

Should we be creating default news rooms and blog equivalents on install? How hard is this to do?

[stephen-cox]

We used to do this with Newsrooms. I'm trying to remember exactly why we stopped doing this; I think it was partly because we don't create default directories. It would also need some thinking about when it comes to Microsites.

It doesn't seem to me to be desirable to automatically create these on a Microsite if they're never going to be used, so we need some way of determining when they should be created,

[stephen-cox]

There's a PR adding a warning message with a link to the newsroom create page here https://github.com/localgovdrupal/localgov_news/pull/81