The News A collection of fields that describe a specific type of content, like a news article, a person, or an event. Site admins can add additional content types by enabling optional modules. WDS can also create custom content types for a site. is used to add news articles and announcements to your website. News contains title/headline, lede, author, photo and captions, and many other structured fields and features. The consistent structure of this content type enables people to create and consume news stories in a familiar and predictable way.
To enhance your news pages, you can add news categories to organize your news. Additionally, you can create news lists and relationships with other content types to enhance your key and landing pages.
The News module must be enabled before you can add news.
Adding a News Article
Visit the news article form by clicking Manage » Content » Add Content » News.
In the main area of the form on the left, you'll find some important fields to fill out:
- Title: The primary article heading. All content types have a title.
- Summary: This field is hidden by default (click "Edit summary" to reveal). The summary is used to provide a brief overview of the news article content. It will be displayed in News List blocks that are displayed on landing pages.
- Lede: Also hidden by default (click "Edit lede" to reveal). Used to provide a prominently styled lede introduction to your news article. It will be displayed above the body.
- Body: The text to display on this news article when it's viewed directly.
- Source: If this news article is sourced from some other website, you can provide that website here. It is best practice to not copy full articles from other websites. Instead you can use a summary of the article as the article content and link to the source using this field.
- Redirect detail page to source website: When enabled, and a source URL is provided in the preceding field, visitors will be redirected to the source URL when attempting to view the detail page for this article.
- Related Documents: Sometimes it can be appropriate to attach documents related to the article for download by visitors.
- Related People & Related people display: If your site has the Person module enabled, these two fields will be available. They're used to associate people on your site to the news article, allowing you to display the list of people at the bottom of the article body. The list of recent news articles associated with a person will also be shown on the detail page for that person.
On the right sidebar, you'll find additional fields:
- Featured Image: A primary image to associate with this article. It can be displayed in a number of ways on the article detail page and will also be used if this news article is displayed in a News List block.
- Featured Image Display: Used to control how the image is displayed when viewing the news article directly.
- Categorization: Use to categorize your news. See Content Categorization to add categories to your news. By default, two taxonomy vocabularies are available, but some sites may have more.
- News Category is used to tag specific types of news (for example, "Research" or "Athletics")
- Sitewide Category is available on all standard content types and is typically used when you want to tag content items from multiple content types with the same category. For example, you may have events & news both related to a topic.
- The user-friendly path for a content item or taxonomy term that replaces the system path. For example, /my-page can be an alias for /node/123. : This allows you to control the news article URL. Most times you want to let Drupal choose the automatic alias for the news article, which will be based on the title of the article. However, there are times when you want to override this and provide a custom path. You can uncheck the Generate automatic URL alias box and enter your own custom URL alias. Keep custom URL aliases short but descriptive and use hyphens to separate words.
- Metatags: Refer to the documentation on SEO and Search.
- Authoring information:
- Contains a reference to the user account who created the news article and date/time of when the content was created.
- The additional "Author" field is a reference to the News Author taxonomy vocabulary and is used to provide a byline for the article. You can control if this is displayed or not on the news article detail page. See below section.
- Published date: The day that indicates when this article was published. This is unique to the News content type. You can control if this is displayed or not on the news article detail page. See below section.
- Scheduling options: Allows you to schedule the date and time when the article is published instead of publishing it right away. You must uncheck the "Published" checkbox at the bottom of the form to use this feature.
- URL redirects: This will show you all existing redirects to this content.
- Promotion options: This is used if displaying a News List block to stick the article at the top of the list.
Use the Save button at the bottom of the form to save the news article. The Published checkbox can also be used to control public visibility. If unchecked, visitors to your site will not be able to view the contents.
News Settings
Users with the role "site admin" can control some options for the News content type. Visit Configuration » System » Modules and click the settings button for News. There are options to:
- Set the default value used for the "Featured Image Display" field on the news entry form.
- Toggle the display of the news author, published date, and taxonomy terms on the news detail page