A&S Web Guide

A helpful guide to web content and accessibility for the Faculty of Arts & Science, University of Toronto community.

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Create a News Story

Sharing important news, media coverage and more on your website is a great way to publicize the great work that’s going on in your department. Not sure how to do that? Creating a news article can help:

Hover over Content in the black header bar, then hover over Add Content and click on News. A news content-editing panel will open.

⚠ Note: You can also edit a News article the same way you would any other page: navigate to that page (either through the navigation menu or by using the Search bar), and click on the Edit tab.

 

News Details

  1. The News Title field is mandatory – if you don’t fill in this field, you won’t be able to publish the news story.
  2. Select any relevant tags from the Tag list. This field is mandatory as indicated by the red asterisk. News tags should connect the story to other news stories with similar topics. For example, tags can include: the names of people mentioned in the story, the names of fields of study profiled in the story, etc. Always capitalize the first letter of every word in Tags (e.g., Food Studies, Photography, etc.) If no appropriate tag exists, click Add New Tags, enter the tag into the field and it will automatically be created.

Tags.
Categories.

  1. Select the relevant category or categories from the Category list. Categories capture the broad content areas to which news stories belong. They are pre-defined by your academic unit, and should be adhered to as frequently as possible. You can choose to add a new category by selecting Add New Categories, but this should be done sparingly.
  2. The Date and Time fields will automatically be set to today’s date and time. If you are migrating a News story that was published earlier on another site, remember to use the original publication date.
  3. If you are adding a news story that was written by someone else, you can use the News Author field to enter the name of the story’s actual author. This field can’t accept commas, so we suggest using a hyphen to separate the author’s name from their affiliation (e.g., Jane Doe – A&S News).

⚠ Tip: The News Author field has a handy auto-suggest feature. As you start typing an author’s name, Drupal will check to see if their name is already associated with other news stories on your site. If so, their name will pop up in a rectangle directly beneath the News Author field. Click on their name to select it. This will help you avoid near-duplicate entries.

Article

  1. Enter a short Meta Description.
  2. Enter the body of the news article in the News Article field. Remember to follow all of the best practices outlined elsewhere on this site and in your training session, such as relative links, heading sizes, writing for the web, etc.

Image

  1. Upload an image to your News article. Follow these guidelines:

⚠ Notes about News photo files:

  • News pages require a landscape (horizontal) orientation image with a resolution of 370 x 270 pixels. Images larger than this will be resized; images smaller than this will be blurry.
  • Allowed file types are: png, gif, jpg, jpeg.
  • Files must be less than 2 MB.
  • Before uploading an image, give it a meaningful file name to help it perform better in search results. For example, Sidney-Smith-Hall-Faculty-Arts-Science-UofT.jpg is a good file name for a picture of Sidney Smith Hall. Avoid meaningless file names like IMG0021.jpg.
  1. Click Publish when you’re ready to make your News story public on your website.