Quick guide to creating a news archive

Here we describe how you can create a news archive where all news items are displayed in full text. A news menu is used to divide the news items by month and year. This requires four steps.

Step 1: Create the archive where the news items will be stored

1. Select the page in the navigator where the archive is to be created.

2. Select Create New in the toolbar. Select the type Archive and give the archive a name. Click OK.

Sub-step 2: Create the news template (if there isn't already one)

If there is a news template, go to step 3.

1. Switch to Page Templates in the Navigator menu.

2. Create a new template, preferably based on another template that has a template area.

3. Drag out three text modules on the new template for Heading, Introduction, and Content. If you want to include an image in your template, add an image module.

4. Rename the modules so that the news module knows which fields to retrieve information from. Rename the text and image modules to the following names:

• Heading — here you fill in the heading for the page
• Intro — if you want to use an intro, include such a module
• Content — here you fill in the content of the news item.
• Image — if you want to include an image in the news module.

Text

You can omit the modules you don't want in the news template, such as Ingress and Image.

5. Now you need to make the text modules available to users. You do this by converting them to content areas. To convert existing modules to content areas, the modules must be in a layout. If your modules are not already in a layout, place them in a layout. You do this by right-clicking on the top module and selecting the "Place in layout" option. Drag the other modules into the new layout. Then right-click on the layout and select the "Convert to content area" option.

6. Publish the template.

Step 3: Create the news archive with full-text news items

1. Select the "News" module on the page where you want to display news. In this case, the start page. News settings are displayed.

2. Select the news archive you created in step 1. To do this, click on the Add link under Show articles from. A new window will appear where you can locate the archive in the structure.

3. Go to the Content tab and decide how the news items should be displayed. In this case, we want to show the image, publish date, title, and abstract. For each item we want to display, such as the date, you decide how it should look (format) and which format template it should be displayed with.

Select the field you want to change, double-click on it, or select the change icon on the right.

• Publish date - Select the font and the format in which you want to display the date.
• Article image - Select the Article image (Metadata) option and select the check mark on the right to remove the image.
• Article title - Select the font and specify that it should be a link to the article.
• Article abstract - Select a font and check the box "Crop if too many characters in text" and limit it to 100 characters.
  

4. Under the Restrictions tab, do not fill in anything, as we want to show all news items.

5. Under the Other tab, check the box "Allow interactions with news menu module."

6. Click OK.

Sub-task 4: Create the news menu

1. Select News Menu from the Other module selector. A new view appears: "News Menu Settings."

2. Under Show articles from, select the same archive you selected in step 3. If you want the news module and news menu to be on the same page, do nothing. Otherwise, select the page where you want the news to be displayed.

3. Under the Appearance tab, select format templates for years and months. If you want, you can also add image icons.

4. Click OK. Done! The result will be: