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How to make a NEWS forum

where members can submit news for approval


To make a news article, this is done pretty much the same way as making a post, except those with news approval access can select the news category in the post and submit it.

To setup News delivery almost everything has to be made in the ACP.

Check your news block is visible on the portal.php (Home) page
From a fresh install it should be title 'Integra News' (or a language variant) wit a further line denoting 'Index | Categories | Arcvhives'. If you do not have this block visible, go ACP> IMPortal> Blocks Management> IntegraMOD Default> and in the Block Edit page make sure the Active?: radio button is selected and submit.

How to change your news Block Title
Go Admin > IMPortal > Blocks Management > and click on the IntegraMOD default page. You will be confronted with a table of the blocks that are visible across most of your board and the two central blocks of Welcome to IntegraMOD and IntegraNews.
Click edit on the line of IntegraNews.
In Block Title: place you News title, such as Guild News.
set Active to yes
Make sure Localise Titlebar is set to No.
This means that your new title will be the same one you set here for all languages. If you require titles in diferent languages, set Localise Titlebar to Yes and edit the respective lang key
Code: Select all
lang_news_block
in blocks/language/lang_****/lang_news_block.php $lang['Title_news'] = 'Integra News';
Go to the bottom of this block and Submit.

Configuring your News
Firstly you need to make sure you have set the configuration correctly.
  1. Go Admin > News Admin > Configuration > Enable news posting - Yes
  2. News Mod Base URL - http://www.your domain/root folder if any
  3. News Mod Index File - portal.php
  4. News Trim Length - Sets the max length for news posts before they are trimmed. (0 = no trim). - 250 if you do not display all is a good alternative
  5. News Trim Topic Length - recommend 0
  6. Number of Items To Display - 5 (it is worth placing a lower number if you post complete news articles and memory issues may be affected
  7. News icons path - normally images/news
  8. Enable RSS Sydication - set to No initially, more info to come later.
  9. Submit
Setting News Categories and a News forum
All News categories are delineated by category name an an image. You will automatically have a mank of images available, but you may wish to use your own.
  1. If you have specific news images you can upload them to your forum in the /images/news folder. Make sure these filenames have no spaces and only alphanumerc characters in them. It is also worth keeping them fairly small due to the amount of information on your home page.
  2. Go Admin > News Admin > Categories Select an image and enter an appropriate news catgory, Submit
  3. Add more News categories,
  4. Go to Admin > Forum Admin > Management +> Create a new forum where News is to be posted/allowed
  5. Go to that forum in the Management + page (e.g. Edit Forum)
  6. Set News to REG if you wanted other members to submit news or just set it to MOD for moderators or ADMIN so that you can only post news, Submit
  7. Resync
  8. go to your newly made news forum > New topic > beneath the Description box is a News Category drop down menu. The default is not a news article so you will have to set this to the appropriate category for each news item you make. Complete at least topic title and subject text then Submit.
  9. Goto the Home page and look for your article there.
Note: Once a News Category has been created, Admins can create a News post in any forum.
You may find that if a news post has an image in it, the image is output to guests as a url instead of the image. If so go Admin > General Admin > Configuration + > Profile settings > Reading > Display Images - set to yes. You do not need to override users setting.

If you have enabled registered members to post news, it would be wise to set the news post for approval first before they appear as news in the homepage.
  1. Go to Admin > Approval > Edit Forums
  2. Edit the forum where news is enabled
  3. Tick Enable Approval System
  4. Tick Moderate on New Topics and Topic Edits
  5. Set the other options as desired (it would be good to have a PM sent to you when a news post is submitted so that you can review it ASAP)
  6. Submit
RSS Syndication
Your website has the power to have its news posted on any other website without any copy and pasting! RSS (Really Simple Syndication) places your news articles into a very basic for of markup language. When another website requests access to your news feed, it colloects that simplified data and allows it to be placed within another web page on another site. This can be very useful, but you need to be careful what you post! To set up RSS;
  1. Go Admin > News Admin > Configuration > RSS Syndication >
  2. Enable RSS Sydication - Yes
  3. Number of Items To Display - 5 to 15 depending on frequency
  4. Show Abstracts in RSS Feeds - this takes the first couple of lines in the news item and sends it with the feed
  5. Complete the remaining boxes
  6. Submit
  7. go to http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed ... hp?s=build enter your feed url which will be http://www.yourdomain.com/news_rss.php
  8. change the aditional settings, and preview the feed until it looks the way you want it.
  9. Click on Generate Javascript and copy the resultant code onto your website for anyone else to use

Further to this (Thanks Jake)
If the RSS feed is used more and more each day, to make it easier, you can add the following in a block on your front page. Please save the images to your server and if the user doesn't have an account it will prompt for one on the survive, then add the feed to the specified webservice.

This is just the code to link to the RSS feed, and the image below it.
Code: Select all
[url=http://www.yourdomain.com/news_rss.php]Link text for XML or Graphic[/url]

Image

This link will add the feed to your my.yahoo.com page:
Code: Select all
[url=http://e.my.yahoo.com/config/cstore?.opt=content&.url=http%3a//www.yourdomain.com/news_rss.php]Link text for Yahoo or Graphic[/url]

Image

This adds the feed to your Newsgator page:
Code: Select all
[url=http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/subext.aspx?url=http://www.yourdomain.com/news_rss.php]Link text for News Gator or Graphic[/url]

Image

This adds the feed to myfeedster.com:
Code: Select all
[url=http://www.feedster.com/myfeedster.php?action=addrss&rssurl=http://www.yourdomain.com/news_rss.php&confirm=no]Link for My Feedster[/url]

Image

So there you have it! Any additional comments are welcome and may be added in.
Released on: Thu Feb 20, 2014 12:56 pm
from: IntegraMOD
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