News Management
Firefly.NET has support for automatic news management. These management features are based around two core concepts, News categories and News Feeds.
A News category is a way of organising news stories (in the form of Firefly.NET pages) that relate to each other. For example, the Boat Club might set up a Boat Club News category which contains news stories related to rowing. News categories can be created using the Create News Category option in the Control Panel.
A News Feed is a type of component that you can put into any Firefly.NET page and which displays the content of a News category in a variety of customised ways. You can create a News Feed component by clicking the News Feed tab when creating a new component. This will then allow you to select News stories from this site where you will be able to select a news source along with appropriate display options.
Critically, once you have set up a News Feed component to summarise a News category, it will always display the latest stories (up to the number of items you define). Whenever a story is added to a particular News category, it will immediately appear on all News Feed components summarising that News category across Firefly.NET. This allows you to place News Feed components that summarise the same News category on multiple pages, with no extra effort in keeping them up to date.
Apart from the ability to display News stories from [your] site, Firefly.NET can also display External RSS/Atom feeds, Resource folder feeds (podcasts) and summaries of What's New in particular pages and sections, or across the whole site. Also new is My Feed, a personalised News Feed which displays updates based on pages or sections that you choose to subscribe to.
Step by step instructions
So you've decided that a certain page is to be designated as a News story so that a summary of the page can appear elsewhere.
(a) If the page has yet to be created, click
to bring up the Add page dialog box, or
(b) Click the Modify Page button
for the selected page to bring up the Modify Page dialog box.
Bring up the Add/Modify Page window and enter the title for the new news story page ("UK economy" in the example shown) in the Basic tab, then select News story from the page type scrolling menu. You then need to decide which news categories it is to belong to. Then click Add Page.
If a new News category needs to be created at this point, you will find a link to do this in the Control Panel:
Enter the chosen name for the News category in the Title box and, if necessary, set users for the Summarise and Post groups:
-
Summarise group: the group of users allowed to add a summary of this category to a page (or pages). "Inherit" means that the group(s) is/are the same as the parent section's Write group(s)
-
Post group: the group of users allowed to add stories to this News category. Again, "Inherit" means that the group(s) is/are the same as the parent section's Write group(s)
Then click Create News category.
