News

News articles and news categories are created from the News area in your backend. To access the News area:

• Click Apps in your area menu
• Click on the News app to open the News area (Figure 2.1)

Figure 2.1 The News area

The News area consists of:

• The left side navigation, from where you can navigate between categories and access category content (current or archived)
• The content panel on the right, where news articles under the selected category are listed – and can be created or edited

Right-click any category to open the context menu (Figure 2.2), from which you can edit or delete a category, create a news article, or edit the category permissions settings.

Figure 2.2 Right-click any category to access the category context menu

You may also right-click any news article in the right side panel to access the context menu for news articles (Figure 2.3).

From the news article context menu you can:

• Edit, copy, move or archive the article
• Delete or deactivate the article

Figure 2.3 Right-click an article to access the article context menu

All articles must belong to a category, the contents of which are then published using the News app.

To create a new category right click the All News node (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 Creating a new News category

When creating a category you can:

• Name the category and optionally provide it with a description
• Select a custom field group – read more in the implementing section

You may also set up permissions on the category, and control which users or user groups can access the category - read more about permissions here. The button will be greyed out until the category has been saved for the first time.

The Templates dropdown lets you select a default template to use for news articles belonging to this category – read more about news templates below. You can force news articles to conform this layout by toggling the Enforce for this category button.

To create a news article you can:

• Right-click a category folder and click New news
• Click New news in the toolbar

Either way will open the News article view (Figure 4.1). 

Figure 4.1 Creating an article

This is where you will create your news article content – and the settings related to the article.

You can:

• Enter a heading (i.e. a headline) and a teaser text for the article
• Specify a creation date (default is the actual date of creation)
• Enter or select a shortcut to a page or file in the file manager
• Enter the news article text (body)

With the layout settings, you can:

• Select an overview image (thumbnail) to use on the list of news items
• Select an image to display in the actual article – and provide a caption for it

Depending on your setup, you may also have access to general or category-specific custom fields or field groups – read more below.

When creating or editing an article you have access to three tabs in the ribbon bar; content, options and marketing. From these, you may access advanced functionality related to news articles.

From the content tab (Figure 5.1) you can:

• Switch between the details view and the categories view – the categories view allows you to add the news article to more than one category, if you want to publish it in several places (e.g. company news & product news)
• Preview the article
• Specify the author name and initials
• Access and moderate any comments which have been added to the article

Figure 5.1 The Content tab

From the options tab (Figure 5.2) you can:

• Set a publication period during which the article is displayed. Once the period runs out the article will be marked as inactive on the news items list, but will not be moved to the archive automatically
• Set the article to inactive/active manually
• Move the article to and from the archive
• Open the article in a new window

Figure 5.2 The Options tab

The News app is used to do one of two things:

• Publish news articles (News list)
• Create news articles from the frontend (Frontend editing)

Whichever function you want to use, add the app to a paragraph to access the app settings (Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 The News App header

Select the intended function with the function settings – your choice determines the rest of the settings available to you.

If you selected News list, you will have access to the General settings Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 The General settings when publishing a list of news articles

With the general setting you:

• Select the size of the teaser text in the list view – choose between showing the entire text or a fixed character limit. You may also use the news text as the teaser.
• Select one or more categories to include in the news list
• Select the status of the news articles you want to publish – only active, only archived or all news articles
• Specify which news item to display first (start with number) in the total list of displayed news on your web page (number 1 is the last created news article) and how many items per page you want

To further control the News app behavior, you may check Advanced to access the advanced settings (Figure 8.1).

The advanced settings are divided into several areas, the first being the display area (Figure 8.1).

Figure 8.1 The advanced settings for news lists

The display area allows you to:

• Select a paging type and style the forward/back buttons if used
• Select a page or paragraph to display the news items on. If you have content on that page which you want to display, check the maintain paragraph layout on page checkbox

You can also style the link which takes the reader to an article, the back button which takes them back to the list, and the edit link. The edit link is only visible for logged in users, and will only appear for news editable by the logged in user. Read more about frontend editing below. You may also alert users to unread news, and provide a text and/or image which does so.

The list settings allow you to:

• Create or edit the template used to display the list of news items on your website
• Specify by which criteria you want the list items to be ordered and select a sorting (descending or ascending)

The Search settings allow you to:

• Select or create a search template to use
• Specify if you want users to search by year only, or by year and month
• Control the style of the search button

The formatting settings let you set a region for the news list – this will determine e.g. the date-format used.

If you use the News app to allow selected users to create and edit news articles from the frontend, you must select Frontend editing in your general settings.

This will give you access to the frontend editing and workflow settings (Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1 The Frontend editing and Workflow settings

With the frontend editing settings you can:

• Specify a category to add the news article to
• Provide a form template for submitting the article content
• Select a template for news items added by visitors to the news category.
• Provide a link to a receipt page to redirect a user to once the form is submitted
• Customize the field validation messages for an incorrect value, a required field and a unique field

The workflow settings allow you to notify someone (an editor) every time an article is created from frontend. The approve checkbox lets the editor approve or discard a submission – a discarded submission is deleted.

To access the advanced configuration options for the News app (Figure 10.1), go to Settings > Control Panel > News.

Figure 10.1 The advanced configuration options for News

With the advanced configuration options you can:

• Specify for how many minutes RSS feeds from the app should be cached – applies to both RSS feeds, Google Reader and Windows Live feeds
• Toggle and configure auto-archiving – check remove expiration date to be able to show an archive on the frontend, and set a default expiry date in days
• Create and edit custom fields and custom field groups

From the advanced configuration options, you can create custom fields and custom field groups for news items.

Custom fields apply to ALL news articles, whereas custom field groups are attached to one or more news categories.

To create a custom field:

• Click Edit custom fields in the advanced configuration options to open the custom fields overview
• Click the New field button to open the custom field view (Figure 11.1)

Figure 11.1 Creating a custom field

When creating a custom field you must:

• Name the field and set a system name (defaults to name field content, but can be anything you’d like)
• Select a field type:
  • Text (character limit 255, 100, 50, 20 or 5)
  • Long text
  • Checkbox
  • Date
  • Date/time
  • Decimal
  • Link (to page or file from file manager)
  • File manager
  • Integer
• Check required to make the field required

Custom fields will appear on all news articles, and as fields to fill when creating new articles.

Creating custom field groups works in the same manner, except you need to create and name a group before adding fields to it. Once created, they will be available when creating or editing a news category, and consequently on articles created within that category.