Best Setup For A Page With Frequent Updates

[MJM]

Wondering if I can tap into the hive mind here at GPWA to solve an issue I'm contemplating. The situation is simple, I have a site with a lot of pages that need frequent updates on related news - but are NOT feeding in news posts as we don't have the staff to write a new post to our quality standards for all of these updates, but still want the parent page related to the updates displaying current and nearly real time information. Similar to a daily archive of events or a timeline as part of a section of a bigger page - somewhere we can update "this happened on this date" and then add to it as time goes on. Hope that makes sense as I don't have the pages ready to show as an example.

These would be manual updates, nothing automated like odds or a feed. Just us curating news "snippets" but ideally following a timeline/archive/heirarchy of some sort.

Anyone done this or have any ideas how to make that user friendly and setup within WP - either via a plugin, a certain writing format/style, or via something custom - I'm open to ideas.

[baldidiot]

So kind of like a change log of what's happened on the site?

You could just have a custom field for what's changed and either use the last modified date or a custom "modified on" field (in case you want to be more selective about what appears).

Then just a custom shortcode that outputs the fields.

Unless I have the wrong end of the stick?

[MJM]

A change log is probably a good comparison, I can think of a couple industry related examples.

1. review pages for a brand that might change and offer different promotions for various markets that change on a near daily basis.

2. updating / tracking legal/legislative updates in fast moving markets (like the US)

Thanks for the suggestion, if you know of any great examples I'd love to see some.

[baldidiot]

Yeah so a couple of custom fields would do the job if you only need the most recent update from a page.

If you want to be able to have multiple entries from one page you could potentially use some kind of repeater field, although the coding would be more complicated on that and I've never tried it.

Other option would be to have a custom post type for "Updates" where you contain the whole update in that post rather than directly on the parent page - but that would depend on what it is you're adding (ie: if you have a section for news or promo updates it would work, but not if you want updates each time you edit the general content of a page).

Eg: If you're adding legal updates for a state you could have a parent page or post for the state (California) and then a custom post type for Legal Updates with custom fields for:

- What state it refers to
- The date updated
- The full text of the update
- The summary of the update

Then two shortcodes: one for the parent page that outputs the full text of what you're adding on the relevant state page and another for the update page that collates all of the updates.

Now when you have an update to post you do it through a Legal Updates post and the relevant bits would get pulled onto the California and Updates page automatically.

You could also have a custom post type for the states and use the template for that post type to output the updates rather than using shortcodes.

[MJM]

I'm somewhat following, and I thank you for the input and helpful suggestions! One thing though, I do want to contain this all on one crawlable page. Obviously the simple route is just manually update each page within a text/html section - but I'm hoping to come up with an idea that contain/scroll/archive updates long term.

Some may remember the old CompatiblePoker updates that were advertised as hourly, run by Roger (RIP), but has changed format since he is no longer around to update it. That was a pretty good comparison example, but years ago and a bit dated now in concept/execution.

[baldidiot]

My custom update post type suggestion would do this. The info would still be on the pages, just being pulled from a custom post rather than being added directly to the page to allow you to output different bits/fields in different places.

See a very crude diagram here: https://snag.gy/GPl9EO.jpg

Update posts could be kept indefinitely or limited to number / time etc.. via the shortcode or template code.

I have something similar in the works for news summaries which I can send you a link to once I've finished it if that helps visualise.

[doovde]

How large a scale are you doing this on? One freelancer with an account that can only access the required pages doing manual updates strikes me as the easiest solution from the get go.

Are you really saying you want to create one central console that can publish to a selected page in the timeline format you choose? If that's the case then someone like Tommy Wilkey could easily craft a custom plugin for you I reckon.

[MJM]

How large a scale are you doing this on? One freelancer with an account that can only access the required pages doing manual updates strikes me as the easiest solution from the get go.

Are you really saying you want to create one central console that can publish to a selected page in the timeline format you choose? If that's the case then someone like Tommy Wilkey could easily craft a custom plugin for you I reckon.

A manageable scale to do it manually as you suggested, I was more inquiring if there was a standard way of approaching these visually/structurally. In a scrollbox, dropdowns (like an faq - probably will grow to too many) or like a timeline. Sorry I'm aware I'm not vocalizing this well!

[baldidiot]

Are you really saying you want to create one central console that can publish to a selected page in the timeline format you choose? If that's the case then someone like Tommy Wilkey could easily craft a custom plugin for you I reckon.

I don't think it needs a plug in, just a bit of custom coding. Someone from codeable could probably set it up in an hour.

[PROFRBcom]

I don't think it needs a plug in, just a bit of custom coding. Someone from codeable could probably set it up in an hour.

Anyone know of a site similar to Codeable, but with Drupal as the focus instead of WordPress?

[baldidiot]

Anyone know of a site similar to Codeable, but with Drupal as the focus instead of WordPress?

The codeable devs do other things as well, I've have them do non-wordpress things before.

Eg: https://codeable.io/developers/drupal/