Last week we showed you how to use Jotter site to send email updates to parents. This week we’ll be covering how you can use Site to upload and disseminate newsletters.
As with last week, you’re going to want to go into Edit mode then click Manage, but this time we’re going into News.
Clicking it will bring up the dialogue box below – it’s empty by default, but I pre-populated mine with some content a few months back. The two big options are Add News and News Categories. The former is for content, the latter for organisation, we’ll deal with the latter first, to give us a nice framework.
Categories are handy both for organising your content in the backend, and also for specifying feeds later on. Adding them is just a matter of clicking News Categories, then clicking Add News Category to get the following view. Fill it out with relevant information (for example, you might want a category for sporting achievements, or for upcoming school trips).
We can now go back to the main news dialogue and click Add News to begin crafting our news item.
Here’s a brief overview of each section:
- Category: The category you specified earlier
- Title: What you want the title of your post to be
- Description: Flavour text, displayed as an overview of the story
- Content: The main body, where your news item will go
- Image: If you want to illustrate your story, you can attach an image
When you’re done, click Add News. Now you need somewhere to publish it. Go to the page you’d like to insert your news feed on and, in Edit mode, click Insert Item, then News.
By default, the box you put in will automatically display the five most recent news items you’ve created, including their titles and descriptions. Clicking on the news box while in edit mode will bring up the following bar at the top of your page.
You can customise this box with the drop-down menus as follows:
- Type: Whether you want the news box to be active or archived – if you have a dedicated news page, you might wish to display news from the past with less information.
- Category: The category you created earlier – by default it will pull through all news
- Image: Whether or not the articles have images next to them
- Articles: How many pieces of news will display by default
- Pagination: On dedicated news websites, setting this to “on” will automatically load new pages when you reach the bottom of the current one
As you can see, you can customise this to look pretty much any way you like!
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