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I think the best way to acheive what I need is a plugin. In a nutshell, I want a custom story editor that preformats a page and places uploaded images into place without the user entering any coding. I think hacking the static pages plugin into something new might be the easiest way to go about it.

The site I'm building hosts a weekly column about old comics, and each article will have identical formatting with the following information in the same location: Title, Issue Number, Publication Date, Publisher, Cover Artist, and the article text. There will also be an image of the comic in the upper right, which can be clicked to open a larger image in a new window. There will also be links to a few scans of selected pages from the featured comic.

I need to have a new story editor page that includes input boxes for the information listed above so that the technophobic author can input his own new stories. Ideally, what I'd like is this: A user with story admin access clicks on a link in Admin Options, and something very much like the story editor opens up. If the user selects the "create new" link, a page much like the Story Editor comes up, only it shows the following fields:

Date of article
Publication Date of comic
Title of comic
Issue number
Publisher
Cover Artist(s)
intro text
body text
Image (all images for a given article are named with the format "[imagename]-description.jpg") with the description determining where they are placed.

Most of the options in the standard Story Editor could be pre-set and do not need to ever be changed by the user, including topic, archive options, mode, posting mode, ID (uses date as ID).

I want to keep the existing story editor for news and announcements, and have this separate editor to handle just this one recurring feature, so I don't want to hack those templates.

There is an existing collection of over 1100 articles from another site that need to be added. I have a MySQL data dump from the other site, along with all the related images. I've added a new table to my database and populated it with the archived entries, but now I need a way to call that data and make it accessible to visitors. The new story editor I described would write to this table.

See, I know exactly what I want the plugin to do. The problem is, I'm not a programmer at all. I can follow instructions, install and edit a PHP script if there's a decent readme file, but I'm not qualified to write or edit a whole plugin like this. However, I can hire somebody to do it for me.

So, is there anybody here who wants to take a crack at it? e-mail me at macquarrie@earthlink.net and we can discuss the requirements and cost in more detail.

Thanks.

Jim MacQ.

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I have no idea what I'm doing.