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tribulatio
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Jun 15, 2003, 1:27 PM
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Use of News Manager for two or three dozen short news a month?
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I am an enthusiastic user of Article Manager on two of my websites. Excellent, a pleasure to use, wonderful support - well, I can only repeat from my own experience what all other users report: it is a pleasure to use Interactive Tools product and to interact with Interactive Tools staff!
Now I have launched another, smaller website, for an experimental period. This is a website with short news items (10 to 20 lines), usually not linked to a story (or linking to a story outside of the website). Only one category. About 20-30 short news items a month. Something like a blog, but more simple: only short news items, no need for readers' comments or other common blog features.
Once a new month begins, the news items of a previous month then get transferred to an archive page - one archive page per month. So you have the current stories on /index.html, then the previous months on /archives/2003_05.html, etc.
The experiment has been launched in April. I have been using Dreamweaver for producing it. Not bad, but typing becomes slow when there are already ten or fifteen short items on the same page (the new ones obviously come on top). Plus it is impossible to post news items if not at home.
Question: since obviously I do not need AM for such a website, would NM be a good option?
In order to determine it, I would need to know: is it possible just to incorporate the NM code in an existing template, i.e. in the editable section, and will the CSS style of the editable section automatically apply to the content produced with NM?
Then I assume it would be easy just to import into Dreamweaver the /index.html page at the end of the month, rename it /archives/year_month.html, to apply the new template to the archive page, then to delete in NM the news items of the expired month and to fill it again with the stories of the new month?
I hope that I have expressed clearly what I want to do. Best is that you see how the (still very small) website looks now (still a problem with one of the borders in IE - appears correctly on other browsers):
Welcome page (news items for current month):
www.religion.info
Archive page (sample):
http://www.religion.info/arch/fr/2003_05_b.html
Do you think that NM would be the appropriate tool for that? I would think so, but I prefer to check first!
I thank you in advance for letting me know.
Tribulatio
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tribulatio
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Jun 15, 2003, 1:37 PM
Post #2 of 5
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Re: [tribulatio] Use of News Manager for two or three dozen short news a month?
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A P.S. to my own posting (!):
Of course, I would need to be able - in most cases - to disable the title linking to a story, since virtually all news items would be "summary only". I assume that it is possible to introduce such a "summary only" option?
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Cliff
Staff
Jun 16, 2003, 1:34 PM
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Re: [tribulatio] Use of News Manager for two or three dozen short news a month?
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Hi Tribulatio,
Thanks for posting 
It sounds to me like News Manager would be a great fit for this kind of project!
As long as the items are summary only, this shouldn't be a problem. I did a quick test on my end and it worked fine. What I did, was add the content into the summary, then edited the template and removed the link to the full content. This way, the user doesn't have a way to navigate to the empty content section. You could also replace the placeholder for the $summary$ with $content$, and add the content only to the content section. It's really up to you.
You can use the News Manager code in an existing template, just like with Article Manager, in fact, there are only 2 templates that you need to edit with News Manager.
I think that covers your questions Tribulatio, if I have missed anything, please let me know, and I will do my best to help you. Thanks have a great day 
Regards,
Cliff Stefanuk - Customer Service Manager
support@interactivetools.com
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tribulatio
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Jun 16, 2003, 1:43 PM
Post #4 of 5
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Re: [Cliff] Use of News Manager for two or three dozen short news a month?
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Thank you, Cliff! Yes, it covers my questions, and it seems that it would work nicely, with a few adjustments as those which you suggest.
The only question which is still open, but I assume that the answer would be positive, is to know if it would be easy to import into Dreamweaver the /index.html page at the end of the month, rename it /archives/year_month.html, to apply the archive template to the archive page, then to delete in NM the news items of the expired month and to fill it again with the stories of the new month?
I do really appreciate your informative reply!
Best regards.
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Cliff
Staff
Jun 16, 2003, 1:53 PM
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Re: [tribulatio] Use of News Manager for two or three dozen short news a month?
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Hi Tribulatio,
Thanks for pointing that out for me and your right its fine to do it like that!
When I ran my test, what I did was rename the index.html file archive_1.html. Then I went into the news.dat data file in the /data/ directory, and removed all the old news. This way, you don't get old news, on the new index page.
If you don't mind the extra work that is involved, it seems like News Manager is up to the task!
Let me know if you need more information
Regards,
Cliff Stefanuk - Customer Service Manager
support@interactivetools.com
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