Content Provider Quick-Start Guide for adding News and Events
From ETS
Contents
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Log in (to the secure TLT site)
- Direct your browser to https://tlt.its.psu.edu
This is the URL you will use to log in to add or edit content on the site. You should notice that it is slightly different from the public URL (by one additional letter): http://tlt.its.psu.edu
- You will be prompted to log in via WebAccess using your Penn State username and password.
Note: My [Audrey] personal preference is to open the secure logged in site in one browser [e.g. Firefox] and then open side-by-side in a second, completely different browser [e.g. Safari] to the public URL. That way I can switch back and forth between browsers to see how the public site looks after I've added a new piece of content. Keep in mind that the way you see things in Logged-in view doesn't look or act the same to a regular (non-logged-in) visitor to the site.
Once you have logged in, you will notice that:
- There are now some new links on the right hand side of the page underneath the Search. This is the “personal bar” and contains: [Your Name] and Log out
- On some pages you may see an extra set of tabs around the central content well of the page. Depending on the page and what permissions you have been assigned, these tabs may be some subset of the following: “Contents”, “View”, “Edit”, “Rules”, “Sharing”, etc
Add a News Item
1. Go to the appropriate folder
Use the site Navigation to get to the Page, Folder, Event, News, or whatever content item it is you want to edit.
News items should typically be added to Home -> About -> News -> [Year] The year that the News Item is scheduled to publish is the [Year] folder in which you want to create your News Item. This is significant in the case where you might want to create Draft News Items with scheduled publishing dates in the future (when it might fall into the next year). Publishing Dates are discussed later in this guide.
2. Add News
In the green menu bar, click on the Add new..." link and select News Item from the drop-down list that appears.
The default view when Adding or Editing a News Item will present you with a form to fill in. Fill in the boxes in the form that appears.
You will notice a secondary set of "tab" such as Default, Categorization, Dates, Ownership, and Settings. Options to set under these additional tabs are detailed later in the guide.
Default
The template contains the following fields:
Title (Required)
This will be used by search engines to rank your page. Make it as brief, simple and understandable as possible. Use any key word(s) that you think should lead people to the page. Avoid humor, anecdotes, and double entendres. Try to make the title sum up what the news article is about. For examples of good titles for news articles, see http://www.nytimes.com/ or http://news.bbc.co.uk
What you enter into the Title field is automatically used to generate the URL of the News item. If you are considering a title more than 3 or 4 words long, you might want to think about saving the news item with an abbreviated version of the title initially (so that it generates a relatively short URL), then immediately editing it to amend the title to the long version.
For example, let’s say we wanted to title our news article “Penn State researchers discover new therapy for schizophrenia”. If we created our news article with this title, the last part of the URL would be penn-state-researchers-discover-new-therapy-for-schizophrenia—while perfectly valid, this is arguably a bit unwieldy. So we might want to create the article with a shorter title initially (say, “New schizophrenia therapy”), save it (to generate a URL that contained new-schizophrenia-therapy), then immediately Edit the article to give it our longer title.
Do not capitalize every word of the title. Only capitalize the first word, proper names, titles and other words that are usually capitalized when you write a normal sentence.
Description (Required)
This is an "in-a-nutshell" summary. The Description appears below the Title in the News section of the site, in the News sidebar, and home page News portlet, followed by a link to the full article. The Description is critical as it is used by search engines to find and rank the page in search results. You should ensure that the main message of the article is encapsulated in the Description. Also keep in mind that some visitors will only read this summary, and won't bother clicking to the full article. Keep the Description to no more than four or five sentences; if you just want to write one or two sentences, that’s fine. Keep them short and grammatically simple. Note form is fine. Try not to use the passive voice.
Body text (Required)
This is the meat of your article. Use it to reiterate the key points from the Description, and expand on them where relevant.
You can write paragraphs and add Images and internal and external Links. I'll be providing more details about which Links to services and sites external to TLT are already added into the architecture of the TLT Plone site. These Links would be added to your body using the Editing Toolbar (Kupu) by clicking on the Chain icon button (should say Internal Link when you hover over it). External Links that are more appropriately defined as external link NOT already added into the TLT site architecture can be added to the Body of your article by simple using the Globe icon button on the Editing Toolbar.
As ever when writing for the web, keep sentences and paragraphs short. Use bullet points, headings and bold font to make the text easily scannable. Use the active tense wherever possible.
Image and caption (Optional)
This is an image that will show up in [any news box or other listing that contains your article]. It will also show up on the full page of the article. You can add a caption if you wish (or you could leave this field blank); this caption will not show up on the summary listing but it will show up on the full page.
The Image will automatically be resized to a small size in summary listings.
If you want to include more than one image, you should include the second and subsequent images in the Body text.
Related items (Optional)
Many times, you will just leave this field blank. However, you can use it to link to related pages on the site if you wish. These links will then appear [in an “Also see” box at the foot of the news article].
3. Save and Edit
Click the Save button, then review the details that are displayed (this is what will be published). When you click Save, your content will be set as Private (aka Draft).
If you would like to make any changes, click on the Edit tab, make necessary changes, then click Save again.
Once you’re ready for the world to read the item, click on the State drop-down again, and select Publish.
[If you would like to make your Event Item invisible to others while you are working on it, Save it and immediately click on the State drop-down menu in the green navigation bar and select Retract. This will make the item Private and therefore invisible to everyone except you and a few other people with appropriate permissions.
Note: It is critical that you always either push Save or Cancel on every part of an item you create before navigating away from the page. Sometimes if you navigate away before Saving or Cancelling, Plone will lock the item and make it impossible for you to edit or delete it.
4. Additional tabs under Add News Item
Default
The Default tab under Add News Item is what you just completed: Title, Description, Body Text, Image, etc. There are a couple other tabs that you should remember to fill out.
Categorization
Once you have saved your News item, click Edit again and go to the Categorization tab.
- Categories also known as keywords, tags or labels, help you categorize your content which aids in Search and connecting content together dynamically.
- For now, choose from the list of Categories a keyword that best matches the topic of your article. Please note that there are certain Categories listed that are specifically used just for Navigation purposes. I will create a keyword key to help you gain familiarity about which keywords to use or not.
Dates
- For now, whenever you create a News Item, designate a Publishing Date (either set to the day you are creating the News Item or a day in the future. It's not critical to put in a Time).
- You can use the Publishing Date and Expiration Date settings to set something to publish automatically in the future or expire after a certain time. Before and after these dates, the article will still be visible to someone who knows the exact URL (and to you, if you look in the relevant folder’s “contents” tab). However, it won’t show up in the navigation, be findable via the search facility, or show up in summary listings such as news boxes.
Etc
As for the remaining tabs, Ownership and Settings... You don't really have to worry about these too at the moment.
5. Check that your News Item is showing up in the correct place(s)
Once you have published a News Item, items with the most recent effective dates should appear at the top of News lists and items with older effective dates appear lower down.
Specifically in the following places:
- At the top of the summary list of news items in the [Year] page in the News' folder
- At the top of the summary list of news items in the News folder
- At the top of the News sidebar and home page portlets (tabbed box with News, Events, Discussions)
If it doesn't show at the top of all these places, double check a few of your settings including:
- Publishing Date under Edit on the News Item
- Contents under the [Year] folder containing the News Item (explained below)
Folder Contents
Folders are items that can contain other items. A folder can have a page set as its default page, or it can simply list the items it contains, using a pre-defined “view”. In the case of News, you just added a News Item to a Folder named by Year (e.g. 2008). This Folder displays a list of the News Items with the latest published news at the top of the list. If your newly created News Item isn't showing at the top of the list in the Folder you will have to enter the Contents of that Folder and physically drag the item to the top of the list.
To do this, you should see a “Contents” tab as the first tab in the green navigation bar in the folder where you just added the News Item. Clicking on this will show you a table of all of the news items contained in this folder. Once you've published a News Item it is likely listed at the very bottom of the table. Move it to the top of the table by grabbing the :: symbol in the last table column titled Order next to the News Item you are going to move and drag it physically to the top of the list. Click your mouse and make sure that it has stopped moving and it now fixed at the top of the table. Once you do that, it should automatically be saved without you having to Click any other buttons. Click on the View tab in the green navigation bar at the top to see that it is now properly showing at the top of the News summary list.
Other stuff you can do under Folder Contents
In the Contents tab you can also perform several other actions. Notice there are buttons underneath the Contents table.
Use these buttons to:
- Copy or Cut. It is more likely that in the event that you might create a News Item in the wrong folder, you can simple Cut the News Item out of one folder, navigate to the correct folder and click the Contents tab and then Paste it into that folder (assuming you have permissions to do so). (e.g. posting the News Item in the wrong Year's folder)
- Rename. Make sure that before you use this option to alter the “short name” of the item. The short name is what makes up the URL of the item, so changing it could cause all sorts of links to break. ONLY CHANGE THE SHORT NAME IF YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY CONFIDENT ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE DOING. If you do use this option, make sure your new short name (1) contains no spaces (use dashes, -, instead) (2) contains only lowercase letters a-z and numbers 0-9 (no punctuation marks, ampersands, asterisks, parentheses, slashes or other characters). For example biochemistry-examples would be a valid short name, but “biochemistry: examples” would not be
- Delete. MAKE SURE YOU REALLY WANT TO DO THIS. There are many ways of making an item invisible to the public (and to the navigation) rather than deleting them. DELETING IS NOT RECOMMENDED. If you really want to delete an item, you can do so from within the “'Contents'” tab, if you have appropriate permissions.
- Change State changes the view for the folder. (don't do that)
Add An Event Item
General note: Events are “smart” in that once an event has occurred, it is no longer listed in the Events listings. However, the event details are not deleted from the site. They are still available to be visited (the event is just not promoted in event listings any more).
1. Go to the appropriate folder
Use the site Navigation to get to the Page, Folder, Event, News, or whatever content item it is you want to edit.
Event items should be added to Home -> About -> Events -> [Year] The year that the Event Item is scheduled to occur is the [Year] folder in which you want to create your Event Item.
2. Add Event
In the green menu bar, click on the Add new..." link and select Event from the drop-down list that appears.
The default view when Adding or Editing an Event will present you with a form to fill in. Fill in the boxes in the form that appear.
The template contains the following fields:
Note: If an Event actually occurs over 2 or more days, create a new Event Item for each day. Using the Copy and Paste ability in the Contents view of the folder makes this process much easier.
Title (Required)
What you enter here will by default be the last part of the URL of the event
Enter the name of the event here.
Note that if the event has a long name, you will probably want to enter a short version of this name initially so that the URL doesn’t get ridiculously long, save the event, then immediately edit it to amend the Title to be the long version of the event name. For example, let’s say we want to add details of a conference called “The 15th annual Penn State Symposium on Sleep Disorders: Insomnia – manifestations and causes”. If we entered the whole thing, we’d end up with a URL that contained this: the-15th-annual-penn-state-symposium-on-sleep-disorders-insomnia-manifestations-and-causes … While there is nothing strictly wrong with this, it is somewhat unwieldy! To generate a more user-friendly URL we’d put something shorter in the Title field when we first add the event, such as “Sleep disorder symposium”. When we save the event, the URL is automatically created from this Title field (sleep-disorder-symposium). We can then edit the event and replace the short name with the long one we want to use when promoting it (“The 15th annual Penn State Symposium on Sleep Disorders: Insomnia – manifestations and causes”)
Description (Required)
What you write in the Description field will appear [on the home page and right-sidebar Events porlets and in the list of events in the Events section of the site. Therefore, it needs to provide key details about the event, to allow people to decide whether it’s worth clicking for more information. Limit yourself to a maximum of 5 short sentences (fewer is better) that summarize and “sell” the event. Write in note form, and in the active voice. (For example: “A two-week intensive laboratory workshop supplemented with lectures and discussions. No previous laboratory experience necessary. Open to Penn State faculty, staff and students (cost: $500) and to people from outside Penn State (cost: $1000). Space is limited, so apply early.”)
Event Location (Required)
Enter in where the event is taking place. We should decide on a format for Building, Room, Campus.
Event Starts/Ends (Required)
Choose the date and time of the event from the drop down lists.
Note: If an Event actually occurs over 2 or more days, create a new Event Item for each day. Using the Copy and Paste ability in the Contents view of the folder makes this process much easier.
Event body text (Optional)
Here you can add as much – or as little – information as you wish. It’s OK to leave this field entirely blank if you want. Or you could post an abstract or an agenda. You can also add links to other pages/sites. (For example, if it’s a talk or seminar hosted by someone specific, you could enter the host’s name here and hyperlink to a web page about them.) You can also include images (see instructions below).
- To link from text in this field to another page on our website. Type in the text that you want to be the link. Highlight this text using your mouse. In the green bar at the top of this field, click on the symbol that looks like a couple of chain links. In the window that appears, you can browse to the page that you want, or you can search for it (search box in top right of pane). Once you’ve found the page you want to link to, highlight it and click OK.
- To hyperlink from text in this field to a page on another website. Type in the text that you want to be the link. Highlight this text using your mouse. In the green bar at the top of this field, click on the symbol that looks like a globe. Enter the URL you want to link to in this field. Click OK.
Attendees (Optional)
You can list names of people who are attending the event, though it is not required.
Event Type(s) (Required)
You can assign keywords that help determine where the event is displayed. Select an appropriate word or phrase from the list (I'll provide a list of keywords already used across the site).
You can choose more than one keyword, simply hold down the Ctrl key (PCs) or Apple key (Macs) while clicking on the second and subsequent keywords. If you don’t see appropriate keyword(s) in the list, or you don’t know which one(s) to select, leave it blank for now and contact Audrey.
Event URL and Contact info
- Event URL: If this is an event that has its own website, enter the URL of the website here. If the event has no website, leave this field blank. Include http:// at the start of the web address.
- Contact: Add details here if there's one specific person who is the primary contact for the event. You can also include their email and/or phone number. Only one person can be named. If more than one person is a contact, then you can enter more details into the Event body field instead of the Contact fields.
3. Save and Edit
Click the Save button, then review the details that are displayed (this is what will be published). When you click Save, your content will be set as Private (aka Draft).
If you would like to make any changes, click on the Edit tab, make necessary changes, then click Save again.
Once you’re ready for the world to read the item, click on the State drop-down again, and select Publish.
[If you would like to make your Event Item invisible to others while you are working on it, Save it and immediately click on the State drop-down menu in the green navigation bar and select Retract. This will make the item Private and therefore invisible to everyone except you and a few other people with appropriate permissions.
Note: It is critical that you always either push Save or Cancel on every part of an item you create before navigating away from the page. Sometimes if you navigate away before Saving or Cancelling, Plone will lock the item and make it impossible for you to edit or delete it.
4. Check that your Event Item is showing up in the correct place(s)
Once you have published an Event Item, they should appear in the appropriate place on the Calendar List and in the Calendar sidebar on the Events page based on the date of the Event.
Note: These instructions were modified from the Weblion Instructions for content providers wiki page
