Promoting Articles from the Forums

One of the innovative new features on vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite is the cross-publishing “Promote to Article” functionality.

In the spirit of promoting content discovery, we wanted to create features that will allow content to flow between Forums, Blogs, and Articles. For example, there might be a really popular post in the forums, but unfortunately it is buried inside page 13 of a thread. We will now have an option (if you have permissions) to “promote” a forum (or blog) post as a new article on the homepage.

Here’s how it works:
1: Users with permissions to publish a forum post into an article will see the “Promote to Article” button on each forum post. This user can push the button which will then bring up the “Add/Edit” article screen in the Content Management System.

2: In the “Add/Edit Article” page, the user will notice that the Article Title and Article Body is pre-filled with the information from the Forum Post .

3. Also note that the original author of the forum post is attributed as the new article author. Clicking the save button will save the new article publish it live to the CMS powered website.

4: After clicking “Save” the user will be taken to the Article View page. In this screen, visitors of the website can view the article and also leave a comment about the article.

5: Please note that at the end of the article, there is an attribution that this article was:
a. Originally published in a forum thread (with hyperlink) started by a user (with hyperlink).
b. And there is a hyperlink to the original forum post.

6: The article is also published on the front page of the CMS-powered Website.