Linchpin Enterprise News
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News Center: How to configure the place where users look for news
General idea
Most intranet projects have a strong emphasis on news in all colors and shapes. News from Corporate Communications, News from different departments, personal blog posts or news coming from project spaces: the variety of how institutions use news is enormous.
That's why the News Center - the one place aggregating all the news from all over your Confluence - is highly configurable. This documentation shows you the steps how to set up a News Center that is tailored to your news concept.
Permissions of course still apply! If a user doesn't have reading permissions for the news of a space, he or she will not see them listed in the News Center.
Setting it up
Let's start with the good news: You don't have to configure anything to have a working News Center. All the configuration described on this page is purely optional.
After installing you will have
- a link to the News Center in Confluence's application header (or in the footer if you are using Linchpin Theme Plugin),
- an overview over all news from all spaces except posts from personal spaces
- a search functionality
- a tile and a text only view for the news items
Additionally, you might want to
- configure filters for spaces, news categories, labels, authors or a date range, so users can filter down their search results.
- style the news tiles matching the ones you use on your Cover Stories on your dashboard (you do have Cover Stories on your dashboard, right?
) - add blog posts from personal spaces to the News Center
Let's dive into the details!
Configuring the looks of your news center
In your Confluence Administration you'll find the options for the News Center under Linchpin Enterprise News / Configuration.
The first set of options affects the looks of your News Center.
First, you'll want to decide if you offer your users both tiles and a text only listing. If you have a lot of teaser images for your news, tiles are the more attractive option. You might want to deactivate the tiles though, if you don't use teaser images at all, because then the tiles don't look all too fancy.
The following options affect the tiles itself: Do you like the hover effect? If not, disable the checkbox in the bottom.
The radio buttons allow you to configure which information you want to show in which state of the news tile: always, only on hover or never. Maybe you decide that the author information isn't relevant at all in your Confluence - in this case you would set it to "never".
Configuring this part works exactly the same as the Cover Stories macro that shows news tiles in the same fashion.
Configuring filters
This is the part where the proper configuration can really make the News Center your central information hub. By configuring Filters you allow users to narrow down their search results according to the way you use news in your Confluence.
To add a filter click the "add filter" button.
An overlay will offer you two things:
- An input field for the name of the filter. This name will be displayed for the user. Please note, that at this point this name has no internationalization, so please use a name all your users will understand.
- A dropdown field asking for the filter type. There are five types available:
Date range
This lets users specify the date range of the news they are looking for. For this filter, there's no further configuration necessary.
Authors
This lets users filter down their search results to news from one or several authors. This filter type also requires no further configuration.
Spaces
This filter lets users narrow their search to news from certain spaces. This filter can be configured further as described in the next step.
Labels
This filter lets users narrow their search to news that are tagged with certain labels. This filter can be configured further as described in the next step.
News categories
This filter lets users narrow their search to news belonging to certain news categories. This filter can be configured further as described in the next step.
Additional configuration for space, label and news category filters
If you select space, label or news category as filter type, there'll be another input field in your configuration.
If you leave it blank, the filter will offer all available spaces (or labels or news categories respectively. Let's continue this for spaces, but all three work identically.)
If you want to make your users' lifes easier, you might want to enter only relevant spaces here.
You can add several filters of the same type. This wouldn't make sense for date or author filters, but for the three configurable filter types it can come in handy. Let's say you have several spaces for corporate news, plus additionally several spaces, where departments publish their own news. You could then offer one filter based on spaces that you call "Corporate News" and add all the CC spaces there, as shown in the screenshot. Then you add a second space filter, name it "Departments", and add to this all the spaces for those news.
The same thing applies to filters for labels or news categories.
You can add as many filters as you like.
Sort your filters
The topmost filter in the administration will be the leftmost filter in the News Center itself. Drag and drop the items to adjust the order.
To edit an existing filter, click on the pencil icon on the right hand side.
If you want to delete a filter, click on the trashcan icon.
Additional options
The last batch of configuring options is pretty self explanatory: Decide whether you want the link to the News Center to be shown in the application header, and if you want to have blog posts from personal spaces integrated into the News Center.