Hi,

I'm currently evaluating the advanced articles module. My client wants a "news from us" type feature, with a limited number of articles on the first page and then an archive with all articles. I see that I can do this with advanced articles satellite - the first page I can do and I see how to do an archive (filter by month/year) but, if I've understood correctly, the module instance that displays the archive will only display either current or expired articles not both. Indeed, in this setup article expiration is somewhat meaningless - the first page is based on the X most recent, not on age in days.

So, here is my question: I can publish an article with the expiry date field empty (which I assume means that it doesn't expire?) but how do I set the default value for the expiry date to be blank?

If I go to view options for the advanced articles module, there is a field for "Default Expiry Days". However, if I empty that field and save the options then when I go back in it has a value of "-1". With either this value, or with a value of "0" for the default, then when I add new article, the expiry date is set to default to today - which means the article expires immediately and never show on the site!

Telling the customer to remember to empty this field every time is *not* an option. The archive should be able to be over several years eventually, so I suppose I could put in a really huge default (99999 or something) but that's not a good solution either - surely it should be possible to set the default as empty? Is this a bug - should it accept an empty field as a default and not change it to "-1"?

Hi,

For your question: "archive will only display either current or expired articles not both".

You can place two archive modules on the same page, 1 display current, and 1 display archive. So, both are displayed on same page, being currently one on top, expired below. or the other way around, it is up to you.

Does it help you?

Possibly - but with archives sorted by month it's not a great solution (for example, if you set the expiry date to be 30 days, then on 15 July half of the posts for June will be under June in the active archive and half in the expired). Also, the client will start asking about this.

My original main question stands: is it possible (and if so how) to set up the system so that when the client goes to the "add new article" form, the expiry date is by default blank?

I suppose I could set it to expire immediately and have all articles expired, but again the client will wonder about the field and some will set it forward thinking that they don't want expired articles - is it possible to remove the field altogether?

Adam

Adam,

Sorry, we cannot remove the field, but can you set the expiry date extremely long? say 5 years?