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Prepare a News Item

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Prepare a News Item

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What are news items?

News items are individual short stories (news briefs) that show up on the mdtParatextNews page on the site; the most recent story also shows up in abbreviated form on the site home page.
Originally, news stories were all contained in a single file, the news.xml file, but of course it eventually became unwieldy and has now been split into separate files, one for each story. These files appear in the /db/data/news/ folder. News briefs are used to provide short announcements about major changes in the project, releases, team changes, and so on.

How to create a news story

The simplest approach is to take an existing news story, save it with a new filename, and then rework it to create your own story. Then just add it to svn.
A news story file is always named as in these examples, where the date represents the date of the story.
  • news_2011-05-13
  • news_2012-05-03
(Note: you can post-date a story if you want it to appear at some future point.)
The only things you need to edit in the file will be:
  • @xml:id attributes
  • the <title> element in the <titleStmt> in the <teiHeader>
  • <respStmt> elements
  • <change> elements in the <revisionDesc>
  • The main story <div>
The changes you need to make should be obvious except for the last case. The story <div> looks like this:
<div xml:id="news_2017-05-29_story">
  <head><date when="2017-05-29"/><lb/><lb/><title>Dr. Mark Kaethler Joins MoEML Leadership Team</title></head>
  <figure style="float:right; padding-left:2em; width:25%;">
    <graphic url="graphics/web_team_photos_2014_new/mark_kaethler.jpg" width="100%"/>
    <figDesc>Dr. Mark Kaethler, Assistant Director, Mayoral Shows</figDesc>
  </figure>
  <p>MoEML is delighted to announce <gap reason="editorial"/></p>
</div>
Don’t forget to make sure the date in the title is correct. Most news stories include a picture, which will also be used on the home page when the story is the most recent one. Keep your story short and punchy. Note that the current approach of providing explicit style to size and place the image will soon be replaced by a more consistent approach based on a set of available style attributes.