compliments our discussion of the Project News page and offers some tips and tricks so that the content developer can easily and efficiently manage news articles for your project site. News encompasses articles, essays, and other items that are relevant to your project, or that you think the community would be interested in. News can also include your own press releases--for instance, project press releases.
The News page provides current status to project members as well as curious surfers. This page also places your project the world at large.
The Project News page, and the associated pages, have been designed to simplify and automate many of the mail maintenance processes. To add news, click on the Add a News Item link on the upper right of the Project News page.
The fields on the Add News Item page have the following functionality:
Date of event : To add a date to your news item click on the pull-down menus and select a date.
Headline: Enter a title or headline for your news item. You can use HTML markup tags in this text field.
Body: Add in the text of the news item. HTML markup tags can be used in this text field.
For example, you want to add an article recently published in a trade journal on an issue relevant to your project. The article, "Widget Kids", was published January 13, 2001, in the "Widget Week" magazine. To create this as a news item first click on the appropriate pull-down menus in the Date field to enter the date. Next, enter the article headline, "Widget Kids" in the Headline field. Since HTML is permitted here, you can cut and paste the headline as you saw it online.
NOTE: Instead of cutting and pasting the article information into the news fields, you can include any level of html complexity. However, as a rule, you should opt for that which can load quickly and surely across a range of browsers and platforms. If the original headline is a graphic, it is a good idea to use the original.
If you choose to add previously published articles, keep in mind that you do not "own" the article. While you can refer to the headline or title, and provide a synopsis that you have written, you must provide the proper compensations to the owner of the copyright.
One process is to cite the headline, link to it, and then provide, in your own words, an explanatory sentence or paragraph, preferably short. See, for an example of this practice, the news page for OpenOffice.org.
NOTE : You do not need to follow the process above for your own work.
Once you have entered the information on your chosen article, you are ready to "publish" it.
There are several options for submitting news: