Help:How to manage news
Concept
News refers to pieces of information not previously known to someone.
In order for this feature to be activated, click the News checkbox in the Settings of the main Portal form.
To add News click on the icon in the News block on the Portal page. You will be provided with a form to fill in.
Filling in the form
- The news title
- A good title is a must to capture readers' attention.
- The display period
- The news may become old with time. Please set a range of dates for when the news will be treated as "new". Technically, it is the period of when this news item will be visible on the Portal page. After this period, the news item will display an expired label.
- Repeating news
- Certain news items are about events repeating every year, like holidays or birthdays. Mark the Repeat every year checkbox to make the news appear within its display period annually.
- Sticky news
- A few very important news items can be marked as sticky. This will keep them at the top of the news feed. Use this feature wisely, since making all news sticky will render this feature useless.
- Drafting news
- If you don't want others to see the news until you finish it, click the Draft checkbox. It will prevent the news item from appearing in the news feed. That you can save it and continue editing later. One it is ready, uncheck the checkbox to make your news item available to the public.
- Tagging news
- Add tags to categorize news on the fly.
Attaching content
Click the Attach button to add an attachment.
- Select the appropriate type of the content
- Let the wiki know what type of attachment it will be. It can either be: a picture, a link to a wiki page or uploaded file, a link to a streaming video or a link to any other external content.
- Link the content
- Depending on your choice, the form will adapt itself slightly to provide appropriate fields for file uploads, external URLs or wiki page names.
- Improve your attachment
- To improve your attachment's appearance and usefulness, put a short explanatory text in the Link text / Caption field.
Publish the News item
Make sure that the Draft checkbox is cleared and that the display period is set correctly. Then save your changes. The template behind the form will create the layout and will format your News page automatically. The news item will appear shortly on the main Portal page. If it is not immediately visible, you can go to the main Portal page and click the Refresh link in the page tools menu.
Exploring News
- Click on the News title or on the Read more link to open a News item from the Portal news feed.
- Click on any of the News tags to filter all news items having the same tag.
- Push the # all tags button to see a tag cloud for further filtering by tags.
Once you start filtering, a set of additional controls (filters) will appear (see Image 3):
- Published. Filters actual, published news.
- Drafts. Filters news marked as drafts.
- Expired. Filters outdated news: those whose display period has passed.
- Year(N). Filter news published in the year N.
The controls have two states:
- The filter is active (a blue button)
- The filter is inactive (a white button)
To remove the tag filter click the blue button with the current tag value in the news block header.
