Keep students, faculty and staff informed of internal events, activities and updates by posting featured news stories in OneStThomas. News posts are a great way to promote an event or activity, highlight an achievement, or communicate important information to internal audiences. Content contributors can create news posts on their own sites and have those stories automatically show up on the homepage of OneStThomas by "featuring" news content. You can also target specific audience groups within our community (i.e. All Students or All Faculty) to make a greater impact for your storytelling.
Looking for how to create event listings in OneStThomas? Consider posting an event listing with date, time and location information and a follow-up news story in OneStThomas to further promote your event.
Access the CMS:
Start by accessing the Content Management System (CMS) of OneStThomas and navigate to your site's content store:
Navigate to your site, then expand your site's Content Store, then select an available News repository. Once there, you can select "Create News" to get started:
Required fields:
The following fields are required and you will not be able to publish or save until these items have been configured:
- System name: Visible to CMS users, unique identifier that also is part of the URL
- Title: Title of the post (30 characters or less)
- Page content: WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) content editor, allows for rich text editing including images, hyperlinks, and more
- Article Date: Official story date & time
- Author: Defaults to the content editor unless otherwise specified
- Target Audience: Located under the "Topics" tab at the top, defaulted to "Everyone". However, it is highly encouraged for content editors to remove the default and replace it with a unique audience group or groups (i.e. all students or all students & all faculty) to help reduce digital noise, particularly if the content is intended for a specific group.
Recommended fields
These fields are not required but are highly recommended and encouraged:
- Featured news: Check this box to include on the homepage of all members of targeted audience (see below).
- The best practice is to use a target audience and always feature your news!
- Post image: Thumbnail image used on the homepage (crops to a 500px square)
- Short description: A brief summary listed as a subtitle on story rollups (30 characters including spaces)
Scheduled publishing:
Content contributors can create a story ahead of time and schedule it to both publish and/or unpublish at a future date and time by pressing the "Schedule" button at the bottom of the screen. Please note, the unpublish date & time must always be set later than the publish date & time.
Pro Tip: Consider these trends when timing your posts. For example, although usage drops over the weekend, most of those users are students.
Story Tags & Audience targeting
Both of these functions are located on the "Topics" tab at the top of the content editing view.
Topics
Using topic tags is a helpful personalization option that allow users to find and search for similarly tagged content. (E.g. stories tagged with "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" can be filtered and searched for in the Search Center of OneStThomas or used to aggregate similar content in rollups and widgets that allow personalization.)
Audience Targeting
The audiences available to target news and other content in OneStThomas uses Auto Distribution groups that are automatically updated from Banner. Some frequently used audiences include but are not limited to:
- All Faculty (includes adjunct and full-time)
- All Staff (exempt & non-exempt)
- All Students (includes graduate and undergraduate across all schools and colleges)
Please note, more than one audience can be used at the same time to maximize this feature and increase the relevance of your content.
Find more information on all available audiences in the Knowledge Base.
Publish, Save & Unpublish
Publish
The final step to make your event listing visible to others is to publish your content by hitting the green "Publish" button at the bottom of the screen. Once you've published the event, you'll have additional options to View the event by directly opening the event listing in a new browser tab, or go back to your main content bucket see all your events.
Save & Unpublish
You can also hit the up-arrow next to the green "Publish" button to access additional functions, such as saving a draft version (this can also be done before publishing), or removing the event from view by unpublishing the content (your event listing will still be available in the CMS and can be republished later). Please note, if you unpublish an event the URL will no longer be valid and users will see a 404 error if they try to use a pre-existing link.