Enterprise News Bundle
Share your company's news with your employees
See the documentation for your Release
Overview
Layout configuration
In a first step you'll insert the Cover Stories macro into a page where you want to display them. In many cases this will be a dashboard or the main page of a single space, but you can place it wherever you like. It is recommendable to use the whole available width of the page or at least two thirds of the width and not put the Cover Stories into a narrow column - although technically that is possible. If the Cover Stories don't have enough room, there might be issues with nicely displaying the contents.
A new window will offer you several layout options for displaying your Cover Stories. Select the layout fitting your needs from the following options:
- four big tiles (2x2)
- two big tiles above and four smaller tiles below (2+4)
- eight small tiles (2x4)
- one single tile
In the example to the left we chose a two by two tiles layout. The page can display four different news from different sources and for different users, according to the specifications made in the admin menu.
If you need a different layout, maybe consisting of three tiles in a row or a column of vertically stacked tiles, you can use the single tile layout and embed the macro several times. But please note that you have to configure the news sources differently then. In a single macro with several tiles, there'll never be duplicate news, no matter how you configure the sources. But if you have several macros on one page, they cannot check each other for duplicates. So three single-tile-macros that share the same source configuration will display the same news.
To remedy this, we plan a layout builder in one of our future releases, so you can build your own layout with an easy drag&drop-functionality.
Please note: If your configuration for a tile provides no news items, the respective tile will be left blank. Starting with fix version 1.5.1, if you have a full row of blank tiles, there won't be placeholders for the empty tiles. Instead, the following content of your page will move up.
Setting the Tile Height
All tiles within one Cover Stories macro have the same height. By default this is 400 pixels, but you can define your own height to fit the Cover Stories nicely into your page layout. In width the macro will use the available space.
There's one layout that features different tile sizes: two large ones in the top row, four smaller ones in the bottom row. If all these tiles have the same height, that results in different aspect ratios for your teaser images. In the top row they are probably in landscape format, while in the bottom row you'll end up with squares or even portrait format images. As every news can possibly appear in each of those tiles, it's difficult to prepare nice looking teaser images for all those cases, and oftentimes the built in automatic scaling and cropping has a hard time because of that.
That's why in this layout you can set a different tile height for the top and bottom rows.
Defining news sources: Personal news subscriptions
Starting with Enterprise News Bundle 2.2 you can use the Cover Stories macro to display news from the spaces a current user has subscribed to. In earlier versions this news stream consisting of news from subscribed-to spaces was accessible only via the Personal News Feed macro.
When inserting the macro, you'll initially see four tiles. Above those four tiles there's the options:
- Predefined channels: This still is the default option; you can set a news source for each tile individually. This is described further down on this page.
- Personal subscriptions of user: This is the new option. If you set it, all tiles will show news from those spaces the user subscribed to. Also, a button will appear under the tiles to let users manage their subscriptions.
Space categories
If your Confluence contains a lot of spaces, and even more so if only some of them publish news at all, you might want to reduce list of spaces that are offered for subscription. You can set it to only offer those spaces for subscription that have one or several space categories applied. Simply type in the name of the relevant space category or categories. For example if all the spaces, that publish news at all, are labelled "news" as space category, you'd type in "news". Now when users want to pick their selection of spaces for their subscriptions, they'll be offered only those.
Defining news sources: Space and label combinations
Click on a tile to configure its news sources. If you don't configure anything but simply insert the macro on your page, it will show all kinds of news from all spaces. This is also the default configuration.
If you don't plan to personalize the news according to a user's profile attributes, you can simply define a space/label combination. In order for the Cover Stories macro to work properly you have to choose spaces containing blog posts, or else the tile will be left blank.
Optionally you can enter one or more label names, so only blog posts tagged with that label will be shown. A simple use case would be labelling all blog posts you want to be displayed as Cover Story with a label called "cover".
You can use almost any combination of spaces and labels:
| Space(s) | |
|---|---|
| empty field | If you leave the field empty, the tile will draw news from all spaces in your Confluence instance. |
| one space | If you enter a single space, all the news for this tile will come from this specific space. |
| several spaces | If you enter several spaces, the news will com from one of those spaces (as if you said "from space 1 OR space 2") |
| Label(s) | |
|---|---|
| empty field | If you leave the field empty, the tile will draw all news from the specified space(s), no matter what labels are applied to them |
| one label | If you enter a single label, all the news for this tile will come from the specified space(s) AND they have to be tagged with the specified label |
| several labels | If you enter several labels, all the news for this channel will come from the specified space(s) AND they have to be tagged with ALL OF the specified labels |
Linking labels with OR
If your news concept calls for a linking of labels with OR, you can do so by defining a news section in the admin interface and select "Personalized news section" within the tile. Please refer to the admin documentation for further information.
Defining news sources: News categories
If you want to display news belonging to a certain category, they first have to be set up by an admin. Please refer to the admin documentation for that part.
In your Cover Stories tile configuration you select the option "News categories". Start typing the name of a category to narrow down the offered options, if there are lots of categories available.
You can select one, several or no category, which will have the following effects:
| Categories | |
|---|---|
| empty field | If you leave the field empty, the tile will draw all news that have a category assigned to them, no matter what category that is. News without category won't show up in the tile. |
| one category | If you enter a single category, only news for this category will be shown. |
| several categories | If you enter several categories, the tile will draw only those news that have ALL of the categories assigned to them. |
Linking labels with OR
If your news concept calls for a linking of categories with OR, you can do so by defining a news section in the admin interface and select "Personalized news section" within the tile. Please refer to the admin documentation for further information.
Defining news sources: Specific, single contents
With the other options you define a stream of news that is displayed: Whenever a new post is published, it replaces the previous one in the tile.
But sometimes you might want to have a specific item in a specific place and you want it to stay there as long as you see fit. In this case you choose option #3: "Single page / blog post". Start typing the title of the page or blog post you want to display, and you will be offered matching choices.
Usually you don't need the news teaser macro on pages, only on blog posts. For this use case however, you'll have to embed the macro in the page you want to display on the Cover Stories tile. This works exactly the same as embedding the macro on a blog post.
Defining news sources: News sections
In order to display personalized news in a tile you'll choose the option news section. A dropdown menu will offer all existing news sections. Just select the one you want to be displayed and confirm your choice by clicking "Apply".
Personalization is available with the additional Linchpin Manager app. Without it, you can still use news sections to configure a special combination of space, labels and/or categories.
Teaser Formats
At this point, Cover Stories come in four different formats or styles. Each item is linked to its respective blog post. You are free to define, which style will be used for the Cover Stories' presentation, independent of the actual content of the blog post.
If the admin has defined a default image, this will be used to illustrate your news item, unless you define something else using the News Teaser macro.
Image News
- The image uses the complete available space of the tile. For best results choose image files that are large enough to fill the available space. If your image file is too wide or too high, the Cover Stories macro will make sure it won't be shown larger than the tile is supposed to be. Please note: In order to select the image inside the News Teaser macro the file has to be already appended to the blog post. It doesn't have to be visible within the post, though.
- It doesn't matter if you choose a picture with the correct aspect ratio. Because you are able to define a certain height for your tiles, but the width depends on the available space, this ration can be different for different Cover Stories macros. The smart cropping functionality of the Enterprise News Bundle will always display the image correctly, no matter the aspect ratios. But of course you'll have the best results with images that have roughly the same aspect ratio as your tiles.
- If the aspect ratio of your picture exactly matches the one needed by your cover stories, there will be no cropping.
Video
- The title of the blog post and an excerpt of the content appear below the video. Users can click on the play button, and an overlay will open, showing the video in a large format.
Title on Color
- The title of the blog post appears on a colored background. By editing your theme or custom css you can change the color to match your corporate design. This design works best with short titles.
- Cover Stories will use this visualization if there's no News Teaser macro within the blog post and no default image configured.
Quote
- The quote appears on a colored background. By editing your theme or custom css you can adapt the look of it and match it to your corporate design.
Let Users Slide through Previous News
In the macro configuration there's a second tab called Slides. By default, slides are off. You can activate them and set the number of slides you want to make available. There'll be arrows on the page below your tiles that allow your users to slide through previous news.
If you enable autoplay, the slides will switch automatically and create a slideshow. Use the delay input field to define the duration for a slide to be shown before switching to the next one.
Configure Tile Contents
On the third configuration tab you'll find options to display (or to not display) several info items in your news tiles. These settings will apply to all tiles in this specific macro. You can hide info completely, for example if the author of a news item is irrelevant. You can choose to show the info only in hover mode, so the tiles are less cluttered and have a cleaner look. Or you can choose to show important information in normal and hover mode both.
Title and kicker line will always be displayed and cannot be hidden, as well as an optical indicator if a news item is set to sticky status.