Articles are used for informal news on your website. They are very similar to news releases, which should be used for formal news releases that are submitted from your department for media relations. Articles should be used when you have informal news that you’d like to feature on your website.
How to Create an Article
To get to the article, you will need to go to My Workbench and select "Create Content." Then, select the Article content type.
1. Select the Editorial Section and add the Page Reference, if appropriate. View additional information about setting the correct Editorial Section and Page Reference.
2. Add the title of the article in the Title field. This title, along with a summary of an article, will appear in any list views news items.
If the title is too long, it will get cut off in the list view; therefore, add a shortened version of the title in the Short Title field to ensure that the title of the article is not cut off.
3. Add a two-three sentence summary to the Tagline field.
4. Add the date of the article publication/release to the Release Date field. All news items are organized by release date.
5. Articles can link to outside sources, such as PDFs, news articles on other department sites or even outside websites (where appropriate). This means that when the title of an article is viewed in a list with other news items, clicking on the title will take users to this other source rather than to the body of the article.
If your article should link to another source, put the URL of this source in the External News Link Field. If it links to a PDF or another page on the city website, remember to only include everything after the "/" in the URL. For example, if you want to link to "http://austintexas.gov/drupalhelp" you would put only "drupalhelp" in the link box.
6. If your article does not link to an external source, it will need body text. Enter this text into the Body section. Do not include the dateline or "###" from the bottom of your article on the site. If copying and pasting content from an email tool like MailChimp, be sure to double check your hyperlinks. View more information about the body editor.
7. If you have a specific contact for this article, click on Contact Details. You will be able to add a contact name, department, phone number and email address here.
Only City of Austin emails are accepted. To provide a link to a city email address, you only need to type in the person's name. So, if linking to "firstname.lastname at austintexas.gov," you would type "firstnamelastname" in the email box. Don't forget to leave out the period between the two names.
Scheduling Content for Automatic Publishing / Unpublishing
Near the bottom of the form for creating an article is an option titled “Scheduling Options" within the bar menu to the left. Clicking on this allows you to add a date and time for the article to publish and unpublish. If your news item doesn’t have specific dates, you can leave these blank.
An unpublish date is required. Best practice is to set this date for two years after the article date, unless the content is in regard to an upcoming event. In that case, set the unpublish date for two months after the event.
Saving & Moderating Content
Once you’ve completed your article, click Save at the bottom. You will then be able to send it through workflow to be published on the site.