News on your website

In a previous post, we discussed the four main platforms of communication on the internet. The two on-site platforms are news and content. We have dealt with content in previous posts, and will do so in future posts as well (there’s a lot to say about content), but today we discuss news.

The idea behind news is to provide a platform for relatively frequent, transient, topical information. The content platform just doesn’t work for this type of information; the frequency of the articles would mean the menu would very quickly get too large to be useful, and the topical nature of the information means that the vast majority of your menu system would never be used.

News Manager Module

Instead, we provide a news manager to manage news articles. This module allows you to add a new article, and then forget about it. The module will manage the article through its useful life, and then archive it. Each article can have meta-data associated with it, which includes a title, date, a short description (which is used in blurbs as well as meta tags) and keywords, but also includes categories and possibly other information as may be pertinent to the particular website system.

On the website, the news section is accessed through a single link in the menu system. The section will provide a list of the most recent news articles, but will allow the user to filter the list by category. An AJAX driven archive allows the user access to all previous news articles.

A News Feed content block is available to any page in the Standard Content module, which will add a short list of the most recent news articles to the page. The number of articles can be selected, and the list can be filtered by category, allowing section-topical news blurbs to be added to different sections of a large site. This content block is usually added to the home page.

The Event Manager

The most common extension to the News Manager is to create an Event Manager. Events are very similar to news articles. They will often have additional meta-data; location and start-time, for example, but the main difference is the significance of the date. For news articles, the most recent article is the most important. This is simple, and works because all news articles describe events that have already happened. The purpose of advertising an event is to let people know about it before it happens. The most important event is the very next one in the future, then the one after that, and so on. Past events are not as important as future events, but the most important of the past events is the one most recently completed.

So, to present events, we need to clearly differentiate between current (or upcoming) events and past events. This is done either by splitting the list into upcoming and past, or providing completely different pages for the two. Obviously, Event Feed content blocks will only show upcoming events.