We’ve successfully consolidated the News published by Public Affairs today. All news can now be found at http://go.middlebury.edu/news. This is the source for front page News items on the CMS, which previously had been drawn from a different News channel. This change should make it easier for Public Affairs to get their important stories onto the front page, since they won’t need to recreate them in a second location any more.

I made another News related improvement on the CMS yesterday that managers of Newsletters will appreciate. Each Newsletter has a set of pre-created “right nav objects” (check out SportsNotes to see what I mean), which are common design items that can be displayed on multiple Newsletter issues. Since the code for this was reused from a different part of the CMS, the right nav objects would only display if they were applied to the current channel. That’s fine when you want to display a link to the Initiative website on the front page of Supporting Middlebury, but not fine when you want to show this on every issue of a weekly (or daily!) Newsletter. You’ll be spending a lot of time setting up each channel to do this. Now, just for Newsletters on the CMS, the right nav objects will look to their parent channels to see if any are specified and inherit from there. This can be overridden at the issue level as well, allowing for variety if the author so chooses.

Newsletter administrators who want to know more about this should contact myself or Chris Norris.