May 10, 2011

Creating a News story

Creating a News item

From the LiveWhale interface, click the “News” tab. (If the News tab does not appear, the administrator has not assigned the news module to you.)

Click “Add a New Story”

Fill out the form with the relevant information for your story.

  • Enter a headline for the story.
  • If this content is especially important and you wish to flag it as such on your web site, click the star in the section labeled “Star content” in order to highlight it. By default this content will be shareable. If you wish to make it non-shareable, click the globe labeled “Share content” to un-highlight it.
  • Enter a brief summary describing the story. This will also appear in the meta description tag when viewing a news story’s details.
  • If the story should contain a full article body, enter it in the text field labeled “Story body”. If your story should link to an external article, click “link to another page” and then enter the story url and source (for example: New York Times). External urls will be validated upon save.
  • If you wish to suggest this content to other groups, select those groups under the section called “Suggest this item to the following groups”. For more information about sharing, see “Sharing your content with other groups”.
  • Tag the story with any relevant tags. Tags help sort and classify news so that it can be directed to the proper location on your web site. You can click in the field labeled “Tag this story” and type a keyword; tags will be suggested to you. If you are unsure what tags are available in your group, click “Show all tags” to display them all and select the relevant ones.
  • If you wish to allow public comments on this story, click the checkbox labeled “Allow users to post comments”. When comments are posted, users are asked to identify themselves. Only logged-in LiveWhale users can see this identification, and can hide comments containing questionable content. Once comments are posted, you can manage them from the news editor for this story.
  • Scroll back up and find the status menu at the top righthand corner of the screen. Choose the status for this story. “Live” will publish the story immediately. “Hidden” will hide it from the web site until you are ready to publish it. “Scheduled for…” will allow you to select a “go-live” date and time when the story should go live and publish itself. If your group contains news reporters, the “To Reporters” and “From Reporters” will allow you to send and receive news stories to these users.
  • Beneath the status menu is a second dropdown menu allowing you to flag the story as archived or give it an expiration date. If the story is not archived, select “not archived”. If it should be placed in the archive, select “archived”. If you wish to specify an expiration date after which the story will be archived automatically, select “set to expire on…” and choose an expiration date and time.
  • Under the section labeled “Story date”, enter the date of this news story.
  • Under the section labeled “Images” you may attach images to this news story. Images are taken from your group’s image library. To choose an existing image from your image library, click “Select from your image library”. If you want to upload a new image to attach to this news story, click “Add images from your computer”. Newly uploaded images will be added to the image library and attached to this news story. Alternatively, you may attach an existing gallery to this story by clicking “Use an existing gallery”. (See “Attaching an image to a news story” for more information.)
  • Under the section labeled “Related content”, use the search box provided to attach any relevant related content to this news story. What kinds of content can be added depends on what modules are installed on your system and what kinds of content are available.
  • Specify any relevant contact info for this news story. If default contact info is specified for your group, this info will be suggested by default. If you enter an e-mail address but do not make it a “mailto” link, this will be done automatically for you.

When done, click the “Save this story” button.