Highlight News Articles

Many sites make a distinction between their "normal" articles and their "news" articles. For example, newspaper sites often separate late-breaking wire stories from their daily feature articles. Marketing sites often separate their latest company news from the product and services pages that make up the bulk of their sites.

Why make the distinction?

There are two primary reasons you might consider separating news articles from other articles on your site.

Reason one: Publication schedule
News articles are often published more frequently than other articles on the site. If news articles were displayed in the same pool with "normal" articles, then news articles would frequently push those other articles off the homepage or main section pages. By separating news from the other articles on your site, news articles can be updated frequently while leaving the rest of the site's articles in place.

Reason two: It's just a different kind of content
Particularly for marketing sites, company or organization news is not the main reason that visitors come to your site. People want to know about your products and services first. Separating your company or organization news allows you to display it apart from that primary content, perhaps in a lower-priority section of your page (at the right or bottom of the page, for example).

How to do it

As with all of your site's content, you tell Harmony Content Manager where to place your site's news by including a special "widget" into your site's design templates.

Harmony Content Manager has two news widgets: ++HOMEPAGENEWS++ (for the homepage only) and ++TOPNEWS++ (for all other pages). By including these widgets in the Harmony Content Manager page templates for your site, you tell Harmony Content Manager where you would like to display news articles. You need to do this only once, when you first set up the website.

News articles are drawn from a single section of your website. You tell Harmony Content Manager which section is the news section in the widget editor. Administrators and webmasters can go to the widget editor by clicking the "Widget Settings" link in the left-column meny of the Harmony Content Manager control panel. In the "News and Tips" panel, select the content section you would like to be your top news section.

This section might be a "corporate news" or "press releases" subsection of a company's "About Us" section; a section of the site dedicated to linking to interesting articles across the web; or a section of the site that displays breaking news about your industry or area of interest.

Ah, but now you may have links to articles from the news section showing up twice on a page: once in the ++TOPNEWS++ or ++HOMEPAGENEWS++ widget and once again in the list of other articles in the ++SPOTLIGHT++, ++LONGLINKS++ and ++SHORTLINKS++ widgets.

To prevent these news articles from being displayed with other articles on the homepage or main section pages, go to the news section's settings page in the section editor and adjust the section's visibility settings. Check the "Don't show section's articles on homepage" and/or "Don't show section's articles on main section page" option. These options will prevent the section's articles from appearing on the homepage and main pages with "normal" articles, limiting their display only to the ++TOPNEWS++ and ++HOMEPAGENEWS++ widgets.

Subscribe now: RSS news feed, plus free headlines for your site

Copyright 2004, Harmony Marketing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
Powered by Harmony Content Manager. Designed by Harmony Marketing Group.i