Using News Items

What Are News Items?

You're probably used to adding Basic Pages to your Drupal site, but did you know you can also add News items?

A News item will appear in the Recent News widget and on the Recent News page (accessible at sitename.calpoly.edu/more_news).

The widget displays the title of 3 most recent news items. Clicking the title will take the user to the full news item.

The page displays the title, thumbnail, and teaser text for all news items in chronological order in a series of pages (10 items per page). A continue reading link takes users to the full news item.

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How to Add a News Item

1. Click Add Content.
2. Select the News content type.
3. Title the news page.
4. Choose and upload a thumbnail if desired. Make sure to click Upload after you've selected a file, or the thumbnail won't be saved.
   • The thumbnail will appear on the Recent News page, but not on the page you're currently creating or on the Recent News widget.
   • NOTE: For best display results, please limit the size of uploaded image files to 10MB or less.
5. Build the body content of your news item, similar to how you would build a Basic page.
   • If you would like the same image you used as a thumbnail to appear on the news item itself, you can find the thumbnail in the news_images folder on your File Browser (you may need to refresh the <root> directory for that folder to appear).
6. Insert a Teaser Break to determine how much of the body content will render on the Recent News page. Content above the Teaser Break will appear on the Recent News page, and content below will not.
   • Teaser Breaks can be inserted with a black and red button in CKEditor - near the bottom right of the toolbar (highlighted below).
     
7. Select a Section for your news item (probably This Site) and Save the page.
   • Make sure to change the moderation state to Published when you're ready for the news item to go live.

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Tips on Building News Content

1. Body Content Starts Simple

The Title of a news item and the publishing date are automatically displayed and formatted as an H2 and subtitle on the Recent News page. As such, your body content should usually start with regular paragraph text - otherwise you'll have headers stacked on top of each other, which usually isn't ideal.

Also, sometimes using a CKEditor Template causes images at the top of the page to get included in the teaser. Using a CKEditor Template in conjunction with a news thumbnail can cause duplicate images to appear on the Recent News page, so keep in mind you may need to choose one or the other.

Images added manually - outside of templates - should not appear on the Recent News page (but it never hurts to double-check).

2. Managing Publishing Dates

The publishing date displayed for news items is the date they were originally published. Editing a page will not impacts its publishing date. If you need to adjust a publishing date:

1. Click Edit Draft (or New Draft) on your news item.
2. Scroll down and select Authoring Information near the bottom of the page.
3. Manually modify the Authored On field to the date you want to use.
4. Select Publishing Options and change the Moderation State to Published.
5. Click Save.