Make A News Post

POSTS

Make A News Post

An important part of your day-to-day use of your website will likely be posting news stories to the site. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to do it:

Prepare the words and photos for your news post
- Resize, rename, and compress the photos to ensure you are using "website friendly" material
Log-in to your website, navigate to the CMS module, and open the Posts Manager
Also navigate to the DAM module and open the Asset Manager, in a separate browser tab
Select the "main" photo for your news story and upload it to the Asset Manager
Once uploaded, open that asset in the Asset Manager and use the + Rendition button to create two new image renditions to use on your news post:
- Create an OG Image rendition
- Create a Page Image rendition
Move across to the Posts Manager and open an existing news post, you will be using this as a template for your new news post
Click the Options button in the top toolbar, and then the + Page button in the lower toolbar that appears
This will open the Add A Page dialog window, click the Copy An Existing Page tab
Enter the news post title into the Page Name field, this will also generate the URL (if there are special characters in the title, such as puntuation and so on, you will need to remove them from the URL)
Add the correct tag for your newsfeed into the Page Tags field (this will usually be "News" or similar, make sure to not accidentally put a trailing space at the end of the tag (which can happen when you copy/paste))
You need to set the Parent Page of your news post, so click the Change Page button in that section and select your website's main News page
Do not tick the "Include In Nav?" box
Click the Clone button to create your new post

You will now see the new web page you have created. It will look identical to the one you cloned, as all the content is shared.

Important Note: It is absolutely essential that you now take a few moments to make the content blocks on the post safe to work with - they need to be unshared with the previous page. This is a quick and simple exercise, but if you fail to do it and change the content in a shared Feature, then it will also change on the post you cloned and you will need to re-do that content there once you realise the mistake. There is no rollback functionality.

Once you are looking at your cloned page, the first step to take is to unshare all of the content blocks that you will be making changes to
Scroll down the page, hover your cursor on each piece of content you know you will change, a pop-up description box will appear at the top-left corner of the Feature, click the three dots to expand it, and then click the + Version option there; this creates an independent duplicate of the Feature that is only associated with the page you have created
Repeat this on all content blocks you know you will change; any content blocks that you will not be changing you can and should leave shared
Now click the SEO button in the top toolbar
Update the meta-title, it should be something like the following format;
- News Post Title | News | School Name | Private School in Town or County
Update the meta-description, it should be a concise description of the post content; the first sentence of a news post is usually descriptive enough to simply copy and paste here
Click the Save button
Now click the Social button in the top toolbar
Update OG meta-title and OG meta-description here in the same way you did on SEO
You need to add an OG image, so click the pencil icon on that small gallery area
This will open a p[op-up window showing the Asset Manager
You have already created an OG Image rendition earlier and you will see it here now; look for the tag OG Image - select that image and press the Update button
Click the Save button
Now click the Settings button in the top toolbar
Scroll down until you see the Page Image gallery area, click the pencil icon to launch the pop-up window of the Asset Manager
You have already created a Page Image rendition earlier and you will see it here now; look for the tag Page Image - select that image and press the Update button
Scroll down to Scheduling and set the correct date for the news post
- You can set a post to "go live" in the future if you wish to forward-schedule your work
Scroll up the page and click the Save button
Now you are back on your post, and can begin to set your new content into the content blocks
- Again, ensure that any content block you are changing is not shared; if it is shared you will see a purple banner on its description pop-up with SHARED written in it, so do not make any changes to such a Feature until you have + versioned it
Once you have set the content, preview the post in desktop and mobile views using the two preview tools in the top-right of the page; the eye icon and the phone icon
Once you are satisfied that the post will look good, click the Options button in the toolbar and then Publish in the lower toolbar that appears
The page will refresh and you will see a green flag in the top-right corner of the page; your post is now live
- If you are forward-scheduling your work, when you publish the post you will see a red flag and a stopwatch icon; when the set date and time comes around, the post will go live