Best practices for creating news pages

Jonathan tmp · April 2013

Can anyone advise on the best/typical way in which to create a news page within BBNC?

The closest I've been able to find to a "traditional" news page is the weblog part, but it seems to be lacking in functionality compared to other blogging/news platforms.

Key features I would like/expect to see include:

Ability to set a "featured" image for the news story (which is included in the RSS XML)
Pagination on the news page
News story can have an introductory/excerpt paragraph to be included in the RSS XML in place of the main body text (as opposed to manually limiting the body text length on output with Javascript)
News ideally maintained from BBNC backend, as opposed to the weblog front end editor

Karen Badham · April 2013

Hey Joff,

I'm changing this topic to an idea so we can track it and respond appropriately.

Thanks!

Karen

Jonathan tmp · April 2013

Hi Karen,

Thanks. It was more a question as to what others are doing for their BBNC solutions but I can appreciate that some features may be missing and good to add to future versions

Mark Siemon · April 2013

This would be huge for us. We put in a detailed feature request for a proper news part in the old user voice system, but it was never ported over to the new get Satisfaction site.

Basic functionality should include:

The ability to create and edit a news article with a single click on a single screen.
The completed articles should automatically generate a list of news articles that shows for each a title, excerpt text, a thumbnail image (automatically scaled down from a larger image in the actual article), and a date.
Each article should have all of the fields mentioned in the title, plus a rich text wysiwig editor for the body of the article
When a user clicks on the title of an article in the list, the rich text of the news article should open in a new page. This new page would have a link back to the article list.
It would also be useful to be able to specify the number of most recent articles to show in the list before a "full list" link was clicked to view a page with all of the articles.

Jonathan tmp · April 2013

Thanks for the input Mark, I think personally I would like to see all of the functionality enjoyed by WordPress users, but in NetCommunity.

For me the driving force behind using BBNC is the integration with The Raiser's Edge and whilst I wouldn't want to upset anyone of the NetCommunity team, I can't help but feel Blackbaud's efforts would be better spent creating a feature-rich API for RE rather than continue to develop and support a CMS which feels dated compared to many OpenSource platforms.

Mark Siemon · April 2013

Good point... So, what do you think would be the best solution?

It appears that Blackbaud has two options at this point:

Attempt to turn the dated CMS features of NetCommunity into an updated and full featured CMS.
Accept the fact that they cannot dedicate themselves to that effort and choose some really great tools (such as WordPress, Google Apps, and Flickr) to integrate into NetCommunity

I have seen some people use WordPress in conjunction with NetCommunity, but it was merely a parallel site with html designed to look like their NetCommunity site. To do this, you just need create a WordPress site, copy the html from your NC site, use that for WP header. Create a link back to your homepage at the top of it. Direct something like news.yoursite.org to the wordpress site and send users there when they click on the news link. It's crude and separate, but it works.

Having true integration where it could be embedded would be much better.

Jonathan tmp · April 2013

It would be interesting to see what NetCommunity's roadmap has in store as different users would have different requirements.

Going down the API route for The Raiser's Edge could open Blackbaud up to new customers that use content management systems other than NetCommunity, but the all-in-one solution is clearly better for others.

In an ideal world we would have both - a powerful (and current) CMS and an API!

James Higgott · April 2013

Hi Mark/Joff,

Did you ever get any feedback on this? I'm trying to redesign our news pages at the moment.

I've tried the weblog part, the news reader part and even a news reader part running off an RSS feed made up of several aggregated weblogs. None of them do what I want which is:

Multiple blogs for different topics

One aggregated news page

Unique URLs for each post

This is all pretty frustrating. The only way I can think of to publish news/blog articles like this is to install a separate CMS on a subdomain, which would mean a massive increase in workload.

Jonathan tmp · April 2013

Hi James,

I did come up with a BBNC-based solution for my problem but for you I would suggest the following:

1- Create news articles as regular BBNC pages however you wish. Maybe file them into blog category-style subdirectories.

(this gives you unique URLs for each post)

2- Use a new weblog Part for each category, styled as a blog summary/index page. Each weblog entry will be a minimal entry with an intro paragraph (think WP-style excerpt) and maybe an image. Link each entry to the relevant news article page.

3- Take the RSS feed from each weblog and run it through Yahoo Pipes http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ (search for combining RSS feeds, there are many examples). This will then give you a combined feed URL that you can output with the News Reader Part.

Does that make sense?

James Higgott · April 2013

Thanks Joff. That sounds like it should work. It's extra work to create a page then duplicate that page's content (or part of it at least) in the weblog part but it should allow us to do what we want.

Jonathan tmp · April 2013

Yes, that's the main problem I faced too - BBNC isn't great for article content!

Best practices for creating news pages

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