Creating Aldryn News & Blog content

Before using Aldryn News & Blog, you need to set up your django CMS project appropriately (in short, making sure that you have a page with a News & Blog apphook - this only takes a moment).

This page is where your articles will be listed (see Multiple news/weblog sections for multiple lists of articles).

There are various different ways to create a new article:

  • From the django CMS toolbar, select Create then New news/blog article. This opens the django CMS content wizard, providing a quick way to add new content.
  • If you’re on a page with a News & Blog apphook, select News & Blog > Add new article... from the django CMS toolbar.
  • Add a new article in the Django Admin, in the Aldryn News & Blog section.

Fields

Most of the fields for an article are self-explanatory, and they behave in logical ways. For example, setting the Publishing date in the future will publish the item automatically at that date/time.

Note that items will not be published until the Is published option has been explicitly set (and the Publishing date has been reached).

A Featured item will be given prominence in lists, such as on the home page of the news section.

Meta Options

Advanced settings

Tags are a set of optional free labels. Note that Tags, unlike most other fields, are not language-aware (i.e. the same set of tags is available across all languages). See the Taggit documentation for more.

Categories offer a more formal taxonomy, managed by the Aldryn Categories application.

Application configuration allows you to select which list (if you have multiple Application Configurations) of news/weblog articles the article will be associated with.

Main content

Unless you used the Content creation wizard (the Create button) your new article will not have any content other than the Lead-in.

The main content in an article is maintained in its Newsblog Article Content placeholder.

To add content:

  • Select your (empty) article, for example from the News & Blog home page on your site.
  • By default, you will be in Content mode. Select Structure from the django CMS Toolbar.
  • Hit the + button to add a plugin to the Newsblog Article Content placeholder.
  • Typically, this will be a Text plugin; add some text and Save.

When you switch back to Content mode, you’ll see your full article.

Shared content

If you’re using one of the default templates, you’ll find that your article also contains another placeholder, called Newsblog Social. This is a Static placeholder - it’s shared between all templates that contain it; in other words, between all News & Blog articles. If you add or change plugins in that placeholder, all your Aldryn News & Blog articles will display them.

In this template, it’s intended to be a convenient way for you to add social media links and buttons to all your News & Blog articles.

See Section-specific shared content for more fine-grained control over content that’s shared across articles.