Creating News Items

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes you already know the following:

1. Logging in to CommonSpot
2. Creating a New Page
3. Editing Content

Overview

All news items have their own page (much like documents, profiles, and events).

News Item Types

Each type of news item uses the same element, as most of the fields are the same.

News/Announcements

General department news and announcements.

Press Releases

Announcements distributed for members of the press.

Newsgram Articles

Newsgram articles are for employee news, and are displayed under News & Media >> Newsgrams.

Step 1: Create the Page

News items are created in different areas based on their type.

News/Announcements and Press Releases

1. Navigate to your department's News folder (subsite).
2. Create a new page for your news item.
   • The page title should be the title of your news item.
   • Select Content Type News & Announcements.

Newsgram Articles

1. Navigate to the Newsgram folder (subsite) under News & Media.
   • You can find News & Media in the horizontal navigation bar.
2. Create a new page for your Newsgram article.
   • The page title should be the title of your news item.
   • Select Content Type News & Announcements.

Step 2: Fill Out the News Element

The news element has two tabs: News and Includes.

News Tab

The news tab contains the basic news fields:

1. Title: The title of your news item.
2. Preview: Something to grab the reader's attention, usually one sentence. The maximum length is 150 characters.
3. Content: Your news article. Since this is a formatted text area, you can format the text, insert images, add links, etc.
4. Element Type: What kind of news item is this? Select Press Release, Announcement, or Newsgram
5. Contact: Used for press releases. Select a Profile page to have the person's contact info show up.

Includes Tab

The includes tab gives you options for attaching media & document pages.

1. Image: This should be a 260px wide image. It will display in the article itself, and as a thumbnail if the article is featured on the home page.
2. Media Gallery: If you have created a Media Gallery (video/audio) page, you can link to it here.
3. Photo Gallery: If you have created a Photo Gallery page, you can link to it here.
4. Associated Document: If there is a specific document page you would like to link to, you can do it here.

Note that since the Content field is a Formatted Text Block element, you can insert links & embed images there as well. The above options just add formatting to the links.

Step 3: Submit the News Element

To finish, submit the News Element and your page will be published.