News Engine Guide
The News Engine is a powerful and intuitive tool that allows institutions to publish news items from various areas of the site to one compiled news page. This tool makes it simple to keep your audience up-to-date on news and events occurring across your organization. Some of the benefits of using Presence’s News Engine include:
Communication with the Community: The news engine offers a clean and intuitive interface where visitors can receive and access information about your organization.
Rendering Summaries: The News Engine can display summaries from various news sources.
Ease to Publish: The News Engine features an easy-to-use form for publishing news articles. This form includes fields for Titles, Summaries, and Publish Dates and a rich text editor to help you create unique news items.
Definitions
The News Engine features two Page Types:
The News Section Page is a summary page that lists news events in convenient boxes with links associated to the main news content.
The News Content Page is the page where news can be written and published.
Add a News Section Page
To add the News Engine to your page, select the page you would like the news to be published under.
Go to Page in the Administrative Toolbar and select News Section Page.
Enter a name in the Page Name field for your new page.
The Page URL field will automatically be filled in. This is used to build the Friendly URL used to access the page. If you wish to modify the Page URL, click the Lock icon, and then you can change the text. Keep in mind that only alphanumeric characters, underscores, and dashes can be used. Any other characters will be automatically removed.
By default, you will be assigned as the Page Owner. If you wish to set someone else as the owner, click the Profile icon.
When the User Picker opens, choose the user you wish to make the owner, and click Add then click OK.
If you want to set the page as the user's homepage in their user profile, select Replace Page Owner's website with this page.
Click Create to create the News Section page.
Note: On some sites, you may also have a Category drop-down that you can use to select a category for the page.
Configure a News Section Page
To display news stories, toggle on Design Mode in the Administrative Toolbar.
On this page, click Configure icon on the Data Summary portlet.
Select Page Data for the Rendered Data field.
Click Browse to view a list of existing pages in your site.
Navigate to the first-level page of your news section and click Select beside the page containing the information you want to include.
Click Select beside the page containing the information you want to include.
Select a template in the Render Template field. Generally, any template containing the words “Summary” or “Section” will work with your data. To create a Render Template, refer to the Presence Administrator Guide.
Select Display All Items Regardless of Permission, to enable all users with permission to view the News Content pages. For instance, If the News Content pages within Page Data are not available to Guest users, they will not appear to Guest users in the News Section Page. To ensure articles in News Content Pages appear in the News Section Page for Guest users, select Display All Items Regardless of Permission.
Click Update Settings.
Add a News Content Page
To add a News Content Page, navigate to the News Section Page you would like the news to be published under.
Go to Page in the Administrative Toolbar and then click News Content Page. Make sure that you add a News Content Page and not the similarly named Content Space Page. Only the News Content Page is designed to accommodate news stories.
Enter a name in the Page Name field for your new page.
The Page URL field will automatically be filled in. This is used to build the Friendly URL used to access the page. If you wish to modify the Page URL, click the Lock icon, and then you can change the text. Keep in mind that only alphanumeric characters, underscores, and dashes can be used. Any other characters will be automatically removed.
By default, you will be assigned as the Page Owner. If you wish to set someone else as the owner, click the Profile icon.
When the User Picker opens, choose the user you wish to make the owner, and click Add then click OK.
If you want to set the page as the user's homepage in their user profile, select Replace Page Owner's website with this page.
Click Create to create the News Content page.
Note: On some sites, you may also have a Category drop-down that you can use to select a category for the page.
Add Content to a News Content Page
The following screen is your blank News Content Page. To add content, go to the Administrative Toolbar and toggle on Design Mode.
The Data Display portlet will appear. Hover over the Data Display portlet and click the Configure icon.
Include information about your news in the following window. The fields of information available to users include:
Title: Name the announcement here.
Featured Image: Upload an image to be associated with the news item. This image will be displayed in the news area on the teacher homepage and the Announcements page.
Image Title: Give a title to the uploaded image.
Summary: Include a short description of the news that will be seen on News Section pages and any other Data Summary portlet that is pointed at your news story.
Published Date: Choose the date on which this news is being published.
Body: Include the information for your news article here.
At the footer of the portlet, you will find the Page Administration section.
The Page Administration section contains user specific information on the page.
Page Owner
In institutions, the task of maintaining and updating content on websites is often distributed between different resources. The Page Owner field states the ownership of a page.
Users and administrators can also grant another user ownership of a page. To do so, simply click the Profile drop-down menu and select the user or group to whom you wish to grant ownership.
Last Modified
The Last Modified section displays when the page was last edited.
Release Schedule
The Release Date and Expiry Date fields allow you to schedule when the page will be visible to users.
The Release date and expiry Date determine when the page will be made public. By default, the Release Date is set to Now, and the Expiry Date is set to Never.
Follow-up Tasks
Page Owners can keep track of their pages by simply scheduling reminders for specific pages. By clicking on the Review option in the drop-down menu and selecting a date from the embedded calendar, page owners can ensure that their pages are never out of date. On the scheduled date the system triggers an email to the page owner, reminding the owner of their scheduled task.
Similarly, by clicking on Archive in the drop-down menu page owners can schedule specific pages to be archived on the site on a specific date.
Note: Archived Pages are pages that are saved for future use on the site. Archived Pages on SchoolMessenger's system can be retrieved and made live at any time.
The Move option allows Page Owners to move the page to a new location. You can select to move the current page and all the subpages or just the subpages. For the move date you can specify a date using the calendar to select or schedule the move for when the page is a certain number of days old.
After the Page Administration section, there are 3 options available as follows.
Save Draft
As the name implies, Save Draft saves your work. You can come back again later and continue to edit the page. Clicking Save Draft does not make changes to the live page on the site. Anyone who visits the webpage will see the live version of the page, they will not see your saved changes.
When you can make your saved changes live on the site, click Publish.
Note: If you use Save Draft the portlet will continue to be locked. If someone else tries to edit the portlet they will see that the portlet is currently locked. The portlet will also remain locked if you close the editor without clicking one of the buttons.
Publish
If you want to immediately change a portlet live, use the Publish button. Your changes will instantly appear on the page and any visitors will see the updated version of the portlet. The portlet will also be checked so other users may make edits, assuming they have the appropriate permission level.
Cancel
If you decide you are not going to make any changes or you do not want to preserve the changes you have made, click Cancel. This will check the page back into the system without saving any of the changes you have made.