News

Call it news, call it a blog, call it a journal for your church. What ever you call it, News is an area to store individual articles as a generic, date ordered, generic content type.

News models

News contains two models, Categories and Posts. The latter contains individual news articles, the former contains categories which can be applied to individual posts. These categories are automatically reflected in your site’s navigation to help users find the kind of content they are most interested in.

Categories

  1. Click Home > News > Categories
  2. Here are listed all the categories that can be applied to news.
  3. To edit an existing category, click the category name.

Add a category

  1. To add a new category, click “Add category”.
  2. There are two fields available for editing…
  3. Title which is the label visible to the public, so this needs to be short and descriptive of the kind of news users will find tagged with it.
  4. Slug which refers to the human-readable portion of the articles URL once it’s live.
    1. For example as article with the slug “newsletter”, the resulting URL would be this “http://www.example.org/news/2014/05/18/newsletter/”.
    2. Note that standard URL character limitations apply here.

Posts

  1. Click Home > News > Posts
  2. Here are listed all the news articles posted to the system.
  3. Each post presents the following bits of meta, from left to right…
    1. Title (click here to view)
    2. Date (the post date)
    3. Category
    4. Published (denoting whether the post is visible to the public)
  4. To edit an existing post, click the title.
  5. To add a new post, click “Add post”.

Add post

  1. Click Home > News > Posts > Add post
  2. Title defines the title of the post - publicly visible
  3. Category defines the category the post is tagged with
  4. Date defines the date at which the post is visibly published to the site. Note that this value can be in the future as well as the past, meaning it can be used to set a post to ‘go live’ automatically at a particular date and time.
  5. Image defines an optional key image for the post which is automatically included on the news pages where the story appears.
  6. Teaser defines an optional abstract for the story. This is used in things like feeds and news lists. As the name suggests it should be a single sentence which describes the post. It can not contain HTML tags for formatting.
  7. Content represents the body of the article. Please refer to the section called “WYSIWYG text editing” above for more details on how to get the most out of this field.
  8. Advanced options
    1. Slug which refers to the human-readable portion of the articles URL once it’s live. For example as article with the slug “newsletter”, the resulting URL would be this “http://www.example.org/news/2014/05/18/newsletter/”. Note that standard URL character limitations apply here.
    2. Published checkbox defines whether the post is visible to the public or not. This option can be used to keep private posts which are in draft-form and not quite ready to be seen by the world at large. It can also be used to retrospectively hide posts.