A very exciting django update

I'm happy to report that django notes mode has passed the first round of testing.

Notes mode won't show up in source code anymore after stories have been published. That's a good thing.

The bad thing about notes: If you're copying the stories from django to Falcon, anything you have in notes WILL COPY. Notes DO NOT TRANSLATE between django and Falcon. In other words, if you edit a story in notes mode, copy it out of django and put it in Falcon, you've essentially just lost all of your editing work.

The good thing about notes: Once the story is published on the Web site, you can grab the story from there and put it in Falcon. Notes will not come with it.

How we should proceed this week: I'm planning to run Opinion copy through django for editing this week, then pull from online for print. If that goes well, I'm recommending we proceed with the full switch next week. But we can discuss that at the Wednesday coffee.

In the meantime, I'd suggest that city editors and ACEs continue to have reporters file in django but move the stories to Falcon. You can edit in django, and you can use the notes mode to get used to it, but I'd go back and delete notes before copying to Falcon.

Now, other django news:

Did you know? You can plug embed YouTube videos into your articles. First, copy the embed code on the video you want to use. Then, open your article in django. Next, open the HTML box from the editor above the body field. Finally, paste the code into the HTML box wherever you want the video to appear.

New feature! You can now link related stories together more easily than before, and without setting up a package (aka article group). Under the "lead media" and "related media" boxes is a box called "Related articles." You can select the magnifying glass, find previous articles you want to link, and select them.

Did you know? You can use multimedia in the lead media spot of stories. So if you have a cool video, slideshow or audio to go with a story, weigh it against the other media in your stories to see which gets the lead spot.

As always, I'm more than happy to meet with any of you one-on-one to help you get comfortable with django. Leave a comment on the blog or drop me an e-mail if you need a tutorial on how this stuff works. And yes, there will be a manual before the end of the semester, just as soon as I get a chance to work on one.

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