Up till now, QuickSites and UT Drupal Kit have provided the UT Newsreel, which displays news article listings from news.utexas.edu.
Our upcoming release, scheduled for the second week of February, will add the ability to create full news articles directly within your site, and to add “Latest News” listings of these articles to pages.
Individual news articles display in a 66% page-width column, with an optional image, and with configurable tags and social sharing links in the sidebar:
These articles can then be displayed in lists, with or without thumbnail versions of the main image:
Other features include:
- an “All news” page (at yoursite.edu/news)
- Auto-generated tag-specific news listings (e.g., yoursite.edu/news/tags/health-and-wellness)
- the ability to configure thumbnail images as round or square
- the ability not to include dates on articles (for sites with less frequent news, for example)
- the ability to set the title of news listing blocks
- the ability to set how many items to display in news listings (ranging from 2-10)
- the ability to make news articles link to external webpages (if, for example, your department maintains a separate blog)
- the ability to inset text within the news article as an “inner rail,” floated left or right
- Automatic breadcrumb generation (e.g., Home > News > Your Article Title)
- Automatic URL path generation (e.g. yoursite.edu/news/your-article-title)
- An RSS feed for news syndication
For UT Drupal Kit developers, this functionality can also be extended in the usual ways. The add-on provides tpl.php files that can be copied to your active theme and overridden without conflict; hook_preprocess() or Views API hooks functions could override date display and other field-level elements.
We’re excited for the content this new functionality will enable, and hope you are, too. Input welcome!
