ocPortal Tutorial: Releasing news & running a Blog
Written by Allen Ellis, ocProducts
Use news to update your visitors with your latest updates, announcements, press releases, or articles.The news system can be used for website news, press releases, community news, blogs, or any other kind of article.
Table of contents
Adding news
An add link is presented on the news block |
The screen that you add news from |
From the front page, you'll notice the news block (assuming you didn't disable it in the Setup Wizard). At the bottom of that block is a link: 'Add News'. This link is only visible to members with sufficient permission to add news.
This screen is a standard form in ocPortal, and the red fields indicate required fields.
- Title: this is the title (headline) that your news post will have
- Main category: This is the primary category that your news announcement will be listed in; it is special when compared to secondary categories as access to the primary news category is required for anyone to see or read the article
- Secondary category: In this space, you may choose additional categories for this post to be listed in. (hold ctrl to select more than one)
- Source: the primary source/author of this source. It may be you
- Allow rating: With this option ticked, your members will be able to rate your news announcement on a scale of 1/10
- Allow comments: With this option ticked, your members will be able to leave comments at the end of your news announcement
- Allow trackbacks: With this option ticked, your members will have to ability to trackback this announcement
- Notes: This is additional information that the staff will be able to see when they are validating this post
- Validated: Tick this and this announcement will be visible and posted after you click 'add news'. If you leave this unticked, it will remain in a validation queue until it is either validated or deleted by the staff
- News article: In this space, you can write your news announcement in detail, with options to include formatting and/or emoticons
- News summary: this is a brief summary (1 or 2 paragraphs) of your news announcement. If your announcement is less than 2 paragraphs or so, you may choose to not write a summary at all (in which case ocPortal is smart enough to use the actual article in place of a summary)
- Attachments: At the bottom of the page, you have the ability to add as many attachments to this post from your computer as you like
After being validated by the staff, your news announcement will be visible on the front page unless you choose to schedule for it to be only made visible on a certain date and time. If you chose for it to be in the 'personal category of myname', then it will also be available by clicking the 'Blog' link in your profile.
More detail
Permissions
News entries may be in multiple news categories, but a user needs access to the primary news category to be able to read the news.Scheduled news
See the basic configuration tutorial for information on setting up the scheduler.Enabling member blogs
Blog posts are just news posts that exist in a category that is owned by a member. Assuming you don't apply a filter, they'll show up everywhere news can be seen (in the news block, and the news archive). There is also a link in each member's profile to see that member's blog.When a member goes to the cms:cms_news:ad page-link (they might do this by clicking 'Add news' on the news block, or you might provide a link for them on your menu), they'll by default be posting to their blog.
Permissions required for blogs are:
- Permission to access the cms zone [set in permission tree editor]
- Permissions to access the cms:cms_news page (it's on by default) [set in permission tree editor]
- The 'have personal categories permission' [set in privileges]
- The 'add mid-level content permission' [set in privileges, or in the permission tree editor if you want to set it just to apply for cms:cms_news]
Don't show Blog posts on the main page
Administrators can disable showing Blog posts on the front page. To do this, click the 'Edit Page' link at the bottom of the front page. Then find this:Code
[block="14"]main_news[/block]
This needs to be changed to filter in only the categories you want. This is done by using a filter list (ocFilter support format). The default seven categories are 1-7. If these were the only categories you wanted to show, you would change this line on your front page to this:
Code
[block="14" filter="1-7"]main_news[/block]
If you have added more news categories, you will need to find their IDs. This can be done by going to the "edit news category" page in your Admin Zone . All of your categories will be listed, with their IDs written beside them.
Pinging
'Pinging' (in the context of blogging) refers to an automatic alert feature that some software (including ocPortal) has. When you write a news post the URL to the news post can automatically be given to one or more ping services (defined in the Configuration, under the 'Feature options' category). These ping services typically are blog search engines, and the ping action automatically tells the search engine to go and index your new article.A default service of http://pingomatic.com/ping/?title={title}&blogurl={url}&rssurl={rss} is configured for you. This particular service is a ping relay service which takes your ping and relays it off to many other ping services for you. Most users therefore won't have a reason to add any additional ping services.
The ping descriptors are just normal URLs, except you can put these three little placeholders in them which ocPortal will use to insert the specifics of any article being pinned:
- {title} (which will become the title of the article)
- {url} (which will become the URL of the article)
- {rss} (which will become the URL to your news RSS feed)
Pinging will only happen for news categories which may be accessed by guests.