You and other Super Admins can post news articles to share information. On a per-article basis, admins can choose whether to enable comments to allow members to post comments about the article.
News articles are a great way to share your opinions, experiences, and thoughts with your peers. They differ from your community's messages in that messages tend to be less free-form and are usually a more formal forum for asking questions, seeking help, and looking for information.
NOTE: News articles are your community's "blogs." Their purpose and functionality mirror that of blog applications.
NOTE: Only Super Admins can post a News article.
Watch the video
Watch the Higher Logic Academy video that covers how to create news articles in your community site.
NOTE: Also check out our Community Essentials for Members Learning Path page which has a collection of videos on site design, community management, and other aspects of Community Essentials. The videos are presented in topic-based paths.
View news articles
There are several places in your community where you can access individual news articles or a list of all of your community's news articles.
Your community's home page
On the home page, scroll down to the Featured News section, which lists the most recently posted news articles. Here, you have two options:
- Click a news article title to open it in the current tab.
- Click Go To News to open the News page in the current tab; you can access all of your community's news articles. Use the navigation options at the bottom of the page to move through multiple pages.
Your site's top navigation
There are two access points in this static menu.
- Click Open Forum and then scroll down to the Community News section and click a news article title to open it in the current tab.
- Click News to open the News page in the current tab; you can access all of your community's news articles. Use the navigation options at the bottom of the page to move through multiple pages.
Post a news article
In your community, you post a news article on the Post a News Article page. There are two paths to this page.
- On your site's top navigation, click Participate and then choose Post a News Article.
- On your community's home page, scroll down to the Featured News section and click Go To News. On the News page, click Create a News Post.
Regardless of how you get to the Post a News Article page, you'll create your article by completing the following fields.
NOTE: In these field labels, "blog" is synonymous with "news article."
News article fields
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Title of Your Blog Entry | Provide a title that clearly states what your article is about. This is your first opportunity to get someone's attention and make them to want to read your article. |
| Permalink to your blog post | Your title will be automatically appended here, creating the unique URL to your article. You can modify this field, but use only dashes, numbers, and letters. |
| Content Editor |
Write your article here, using the options in the toolbar to format (bold, underline, indent, bullet) your text, and you can add images, videos, and links. NOTE: See Content Editor to learn more about the editor options. |
| Search Engine Optimization | Click Show to access the following five options. |
| Meta Title | The HTML title element of your article page. It summarizes the page's content and appears in browsers, search engine results pages, and external sites. |
| Meta Description | An approximately 160-character snippet, a tag in HTML, that summarizes your article page's content. Search engines show this in search results typically when the searched for phrase is contained in the description. Optimizing the meta description is a very important aspect of on-page SEO. |
| Featured Image |
The image that represents your news article. |
| Canonical URL |
The search engine-friendly URL that you want search engines to treat as authoritative. In instances where multiple URLs go to the same place, providing a canonical URL helps instruct a search engine as to the primary URL. |
| Additional Meta |
Use this field to add any other metadata that you want to identify your news article. |
| Associate this post with a community |
You are associated with only one community, so this field will be pre-populated with the name of that community. |
| Who can read your blog entry? |
Set the visibility "security level" for your news article to control who can read it.
|
| Who can make comments on this? | Choose whether Members (only; no other users) can comment on your article or disable commenting. |
| Other options | After creating your news article, you can:
NOTE: As you create your article, your work is automatically saved whenever you're idle for 10 seconds. TIP: See Schedule & Draft Content to learn more about these options. |
Add tags to a news article
Tags are a great way to link and retrieve similar content. When a user clicks a tag, all content in your community that has that same tag applied to it will be presented to the user.
There are two types of tags:
- Formal tags are defined by Super Admins to reflect the account's approved tagging taxonomy. These are organized into Tag Groups, and each Tag Group can be made available to users or limited to admins only.
- User-created tags are exactly what they sound like, and with them, users can tag their own content (e.g., messages, news articles) with their own keywords.
NOTES
- A Super Admin must enable this feature.
- User-created tags are available for use by all other users.
NOTE: The head-&-shoulders icon on the FrogPajamas tag (above) indicates that this is a user-created tag.
To add a tag to your news article:
- Click Add a tag. A list will appear if tags have already been created in your community.
- Choose a tag from the list. OR...
- Type the tag that you want to add and press Enter.
NOTE: Tags cannot contain spaces. Invalid tag characters: @ # $ : &
The tag displays indicating that it has been added. Repeat these steps to add more tags.