News Menu and Articles
A news menu displays a dynamically generated list of your news articles, usually showing the article title, date, a thumbnail image and an extract of the article (this can be customised by the developer). Each article is created as a separate page, which is then automatically added to the menu. Clicking on a article title in the menu takes the visitor to the full article.
Create a page in your site called News (or Latest News etc – whatever you would like it to be called) and make sure you have selected the News Menu template (this comes as standard with the latest version of Site Manager – if you do not see it in your list of templates you may not have this functionality currently available).
Once this page has been created, double click on it’s name in the left column to create sub-pages. You will need to create a separate page for each article ensuring that you use the FAQ/News Article template for these new pages.
Edit the news articles in the same way as editing a ‘normal’ page by adding your content text and an image if required, then save the page. Repeat this for each article then when you have added all your articles preview your site and view the ‘News’ page. You should see a list of all your articles along with a thumbnail of the image you added, the date it was created and an extract of the text.
The date of each article displayed is the date that the page was created. You can change this date to the date the article was written by right-clicking on the article in the left column of the editor and clicking on properties. Click on the Advanced tab on the far right and you will see a section called Creation Date. Tick the box that says ‘Change creation date’ and a date field will appear underneath it. Enter your required date into this box and click OK.
Refresh the menu in the site preview and the date of your article should have changed. By default the menu displays articles in order of descending date with the latest article at the top so you may find that changing the creation date also changes the order the articles are displayed in.
If you wish to limit the number of articles being displayed on the menu, edit the News page, right click on the menu of articles and click properties. About halfway down the properties dialog box there is an option labelled ‘Max options’, enter a number into this box and the menu will never display more than this limit. You can also alter the order of your articles by selecting a different value from the drop down box below this labelled ‘Order by’, although for news articles it is recommended to have the latest news at the top of the menu. When you have made your changes click OK.
When you are happy with your news articles publish the menu and all of the sub-pages for them to appear on your live site.
