Going Live: Content Scheduling with Slot Machine
An introduction to Slot Machine, originally developed as FastCompany.com's publication engine. Slot Machine offers a channel-friendly scheduling/promotion system, especially useful on sites with a constant stream of content and a regular publication schedule. Think of it as the supersized lovechild of nodequeue and scheduler.
We'll cover the basics of content scheduling, demonstrate the module in action with a case study, and discuss advanced features such as content rotation.
Marco Carbone
Agenda
- The Drupal scheduling problem
- Slot Machine overview
- Configuring your slot types and update frequencies
- Slotting content with the Featured Content Queue
- Viewing the live schedule on Slot Machine
- Managing and reordering slot queues
- Content rotation
- Displaying your content with Views, channels, or the API
- Case study: online magazine with multiple channels
Slot Machine offers two administrative tools: 1) the Featured Content Queue, which allows admins to push incoming content into various slots for a particular channel. For example, an article draft could be slotted to appear in the "Sports" channel in the "Feature of the Day" block; and 2) the Slot Machine, where you can see what is currently published in each slot, view and reorder the queue of items waiting to be published for each slot, and modify the frequency of update for each slot (e.g., 'Every Morning', 'Every 4 Hours', etc.).
Goals
After attending this session, you'll have a good idea of how Slot Machine can be used to manage the content on sites of varying complexity, from a basic news or personal site to a professional online magazine.
Resources