News articles: publishing center news articles

Introduction

This page describes how to create and publish News Articles and uses an example from a Research Center (Maxwell's Center for Policy Research).   Here is the specific news article used as an example in this training example.


Please Read

There are several types of news articles that can be published through Sitefinity.  This example demonstrates how to publish a simple news article and does not list how every field in this content type works. It shows only the essential fields needed for a typical news article that could be published by by a Maxwell Center. 


Logging into Sitefinity


Creating a News Article

  1. From the Sitefinity Dashboard go to the menu Content >> News Articles





  2. Click the green "Create a news article" button on the right side of the page:

Essential News Article Fields

The following fields are suggested for Center News Articles:

  • Title *

  • Summary

  • Article Before Quote
  • Feed Image (374px wide by 374 px high)

    • Related People
    • Related units
    • News Topics and Issues
    • Article Type 


*  This field is required before you can  use the Save as Draft feature.  


News Article Field Descriptions

Title

This will become the clickable link into the Research Brief and is limited to 100 characters.   This limitation is to ensure that it will fit across all Maxwell digital platforms (web site, newsletters, digital signage, etc).  

Summary

This is the tease of information about the article that appears below the title where automated listings of news are displayed.  The summary should be written to complement, but not be redundant with the title.  The use of acronyms should be avoided. 

Article Before Quote

For most news articles, this before quote field will contain the entire body of the article and the matching "Article text after quote" field can be ignored.  Text can be directly entered into the page and/or can be pasted into the editor from other text sources.  If you want to place an image into the  article body, it needs to be properly sized for web publication before being uploaded.   Please contact ictwebmaster@syr.edu for further information on sizing and captioning images.  


Feed and Hero Image

Like with the summary field mentioned above, Sitefinity has the ability to assemble lists of news articles into feeds.  In some instances these feeds also can display images along with the headlines.  The feed image you upload here becomes this image used in feeds and "widgets" used across the site.  Size image to 374 pixels wide by 374 pixels high. If no image is used, the block "S" Maxwell logo will be displayed. 


Related People

To make better connected site, please select related Maxwell people who are mentioned in the article.   All Maxwell faculty and staff will have profiles already created in Sitefinity that can be easily browsed to through this interface.  Click the "+" icon to find and select the related people:

 


Recently used profiles will appear on the list automatically.  If the person you are looking for does not appear here, type in their name or click on the "Show all people" link to browse for more.  If you want the person's headshot to automatically appear in the body of the article, check the "Show related people headshots" box below the list. 

If you have already placed an image manually in the body of the article (specifically in the opening couple of paragraphs), we DO NOT recommend checking this box because as the headshot and the body image you have placed will likely be too close together.   


Related Units

This field allows you to build associations between this article and the  Maxwell "units" mentioned in it.  In this case the article touches upon a Center, Department and an online Program.  The selector for finding and choosing the appropriate units behaves similarly to the related people function above.


When making your selection you will find that choices are divided into four groups including administrative , certificates, departments and research units.  Here is that selector expanded to show the Research portion of the selector:

 


About Whom and of What Type

These selections will allow web site visitors filtering capabilities to help them narrow down items in various news feeds (headline listings).  Click the "+" sign to display the interface where you can make your selections for who the article is about and what type of article it is.

Search engine optimization and social media

Each of these sections have a title and description.  These fields will be auto-populated by the article's main title and summary.  Each of these fields have character limits so they may need to be edited down in length. 

The search engine optimization field is used by Google and other search engines to better understand your content.  They may also use this text when listing your page in search results.  The social media fields will be referenced when this content is shared on social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)


Previewing and Publishing

We suggest that when constructing the article editors use the Save as draft and preview functions and which are located at the top and bottom of the page.  When ready  click the Publish button to place it in its respective section of the Maxwell school web site. 

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