Ultra News Article 1 User Guide Expand the Bookmark menu in left side to see the table of contents. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 1 of 34
Overview What is Ultra News Article Ultra News Article (UNA) is a DotNetNuke (DNN) module designed to work in DotNetNuke websites ONLY. For further information about DotNetNuke, please visit www.dotnetnuke.com. You may have a lot of rich html contents to publish on your DNN website, for example, blogs, travel notes, news, press releases, product release notes you can use the core Announcements module installed together with DotNetNuke to publish these contents, but it s pretty simple, if you want to extend its feature, you may need to purchase a dedicated article module, UNA is one of the best choice. There are many article modules in the market, some of them offers a good set of basic features to manage categories and articles, so do UNA, UNA allows you to configure which roles are allowed to post articles and which roles can approve them, managers can mark a user as "trusted" so his further artilcles no longer need approval, article authors can use "My Work" feature to manage their own articles, managers can use "Expired" feature to manage expired articles and possibly republish them, beside this, UNA offers below exclusive features you never seen in other article modules: Save as PDF A Save As PDF link is available when you read an article, when click it UNA will convert the article content to Adobe PDF format and allows you to open/save it. Google Maps extension for FCKEditor FCKEditor is the default html editor for DotNetNuke, which allows you to edit html contents in WYSIWYG(what you see is what you get), UNA comes with an extension for FCKEditor, once you install it, you can easily add a link in your html content to specific point on google maps. Google Ajax Search You can use tags (keywords) to describe your articles, when your visitors read an article, UNA is able to show related contents on google with these keywords, including but not restricted to pictures, videos, news. Flash Calendar Similar to the calendar module in Ultra Media Gallery, the flash celandar in UNA allows you to browse all active articles in a flash movie, clicking on a day allows you to see articles of this day. Subscribe to rss feeds Some other article modules allows you to subscribe to it, so do UNA, however, UNA is even able to subscribe to other content vendors, and automatically pull contents from these websites to your website. Templates & Color Schemes Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 2 of 34
You can fully customize the look and feed in Ultra News Article, a lot of custom controls are supported in the article list and article detail page, you can edit your display template to determine whether to use them, and how to organize them; Color Schemes are css styles, each template in UNA could include unlimited css styles, so you can have different look and feel even you use same template. Multi-pages article Some other article modules also support multi-pages article, but it takes quite a lot steps to create it, you need to click Add Page button, enter the content of this page, then click the Add Page button again. Quite complicated, however, UNA support the Page Break command ( ) in FCKEditor, you just need to click this button to insert a new page. Ultra News Article contains 8 modules, below is a complete preview: 1. Ultra News Article The main module, all modules below are satellite modules. 2. UNA-Archives Display a list of months which contain expired articles. 3. UNA-CategoryList Display a list of categories in an existing instance of Ultra News Article. 4. UNA-FlashCalendar A flash calendar which allows you to quickly browse all articles in an existing instance of Ultra News Article. 5. UNA-FreeArticleList Display a list of articles with up to 2 sort options in an existing instance of Ultra News Article, optional sort options are: Latest, Most Viewed, Most Discussed, Spotlight, Top Recommended and Profile Integration. 6. UNA-RssFeeds Display a list of rss feeds for an existing instance of Ultra News Article. 7. UNA-Search Search articles in an existing instance of Ultra News Article 8. UNA-TagList Display a list of latest or most popular tags in an existing instance of Ultra News Article. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 3 of 34
System requirements Ultra News Article is designed to work in ALL DNN 4.5.x and higher websites, including but not restricted to 4.5.x, 4.6.x, 4.7.x, 4.8.x, 4.9.x, 5.0.x, and 5.1.x. Baside the Save as PDF feature, UNA works on all web servers, even your website is configured to run under Medium Trust. About the Save as PDF feature, it works fine if your website runs in Full Trust, however, if your website runs in Medium Trust, UNA will contact bizmodules.net and our application will help UNA to generate the PDF, so actually it works on 99% computers, why there is 1 percent left? Because some web server may not be able to connect to bizmodules.net server due to firewall configuration. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 4 of 34
Installation guide UNA is a standard DNN module, you can install it as any other DNN modules, no special step is required. If you even don t know how to install a DNN module, we suggest you to take a look at Installation guide chapter in Ultra Media Gallery user guide, you can find it on bizmodules.net downloads page. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 5 of 34
Uninstallation guide UNA use some common files as other bizmodules.net modules, such as Ultra Video Gallery, Save as PDF, below is a complete list: BizModules.License.dll BizModules.Profile.dll BizModules.HtmlToPdf.dll wnvhtmlconvert.dll Base on our experience, DNN won t delete these files when uninstall UNA, however, if DNN do delete them, you will definitely get a missing dll error in Ultra Video Gallery or Save as PDF like this: Error: is currently unavailable. DotNetNuke.Services.Exceptions.ModuleLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'BizModules.License, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. ---> System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'BizModules.License, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. File name: 'BizModules.License, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' If you encounter this kind of problem, just simply extract these files from UNA installation package (or from UVG, SAP, because they are common), and manually copy to your site /bin folder. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 6 of 34
Obtaining technical support We offer long-term technical support to all licensed users. You can reach the support forum at: http://www.bizmodules.net/forums/tabid/55/default.aspx, in the forum you can browse topics submitted by other users, or post a new topic if you find that your issue has not yet been discussed in the forum. For brief questions about this product and for all other matters regarding our products, email: service@bizmodules.net Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 7 of 34
Getting started The 1 st glance Add Ultra News Article to a page, you will see the the Do you know screen like this: You can find some useful information in this screen, make sure you understand it then click Start button to start use this module: There are 9 links at the top of the module, when you login as admin user you are able to use all of them, but users who have permission to add articles only will only see Home, Add New, and My Work, users who have manage permission will see above three plus Approve, Expired, Subscriptions, and Categories. Users who have Edit permission in this module will see all of them. Assume you already added some articles, this module may looks like this: Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 8 of 34
We call this page the Article List page, when you click the title of an article you will see the details of this article, we call this the Article Detail page: Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 9 of 34
The Recommend ( ) button allows you to recommend an article, the Save as PDF ( ) button allows you to save this article as a PDF file and download it, you may ask what s the difference between this button and our independent Save as PDF module, the Save as PDF button in UNA just convert the article content to a PDF file, without anything else on your DNN page, but the Save as PDF module converts the entire page. The Previous Page and Next Page allows you to read other pages of this article, in later chapters we will discuss how to separate different pages in an article, it s very simple. I use Academy as tags for this article, you can see this tag is displayed below the article content, on right side, UNA use this tag to search and show related stuffs on google. The screenshot above use the default display template and color scheme, now let s choose another template and scheme, find these 2 options in Settings ( ) page: 3 display templates are included in UNA, each template have 2 ~ 4 color schemes, this may not fit your requirement, but in later chapters we will discuss how to add your own display templates and color schemes, it s pretty simple. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 10 of 34
Now let s choose Blog template and Red scheme: Now the layout and appereance of your article list page looks completely different. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 11 of 34
Module Configuration Before using this product you need to setup permissions. Click Settings( ) link in the top of the module, scroll down and find the permission configuration section: Please properly config the permission before continue, in this document I assume you set Add Article Roles to Registered Users only, and set Administrators as Manage Roles, which means all site users are able to add articles, but it must be approved by administrators. Below is a complete screenshot of the settings page: Most options will be discussed in later chapters, a few options are not mentioned in this document but click on the question mark ( ) will give you an instruction. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 12 of 34
Manage categories Before add a new article, let s setup article categories at first, click Categories link in the top of the module, you will see a screen like this: You can click Add New button to add a new category, or use the edit ( existing category. ) button to update an UNA allows an article to be linked to multiple categories, 2 options in Settings( to this behavior: ) page are related When check Require Category, you must select at least 1 category when you add an article, the Max Categories option dictates the maximum categories you can select. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 13 of 34
Add Article Click the Add New ( ) in the top of the module to add your 1 st article: Before save it you should either enter the summary or content, if both fields are empty UNA won t allow you to save it. In default, the summary field is a pure text input, you can either remove this field or change it to a rich html input, to do this, find this option in Settings( ) page: Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 14 of 34
The Publish Date defaults to the current day, in default the Expiry Date is empty, the Default Lifecycle option in Settings( ) page are related to this behavior: If you select a positive value, UNA will automatically update the Expire Date field in Add Article page when you enter the Publish Date. Enter some tags for your articles, which can either be used to link related articles, or used to search related stuffs on google. Expand the Resources section in the bottom, you can further see these options: You can optionally upload/select an image for this article, this image will be shown both in article list and article detail page. In article detail page, the image is shown with its original size, but if the original size is shown in article list page it may be too large, the Max image width option in Settings( ) page can be used to restrict it, please note UNA doesn t actually resize it, UNA just check the image size to see if it s too large, if so UNA will use width property in html img tag to limit its size in client browser. You can optionally upload/select a file download for this article, the file can be in any format, when you read this article you will see a Download button to download this file. The link field is also optional, if a link is specified, a Link button will be displayed in article detail page. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 15 of 34
The Save as Draft button in the bottom can be used to save this article, the status of this article is Draft so you can further edit it before submit. The Save & Submit button can be used to submit this article, if current user is a manager (users who have Manage permission in this module), this article will be instantly published without approval process, otherwise this article is sent to waiting for approval list, a notification email is sent to managers about this article at same time. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 16 of 34
Approve articles Login as a normal registered user and submit an article, then login as a manager and click Approve ( ) link in the top to see the approval page: All pending articles are displayed here, you can either Approve ( ) or Reject ( ) them, an emails notification is sent to the author when an article is approved or rejected. Please note to reject an article actually lead to deletion of this article. An exclusive feature in UNA is to Trust an user, when an user is trusted, all pending articles from him will be approved, and he will be added to the Trusted user list, so his future articles don t need approval any more. Use button to trust an user, you can remove a user from trusted user list in the right side. An email notification is sent when a user is trusted or untrusted. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 17 of 34
My articles Click My Work ( ) link in the top, you will be able to manage all of your articles: You can use All, Drafts, Approved and Unapproved to limit the status of articles, the search form on right side may also be helpful to find specific article. Please note a Pencil ( ) button will be displayed beside article title when you read it or see it in article list if you have permission to edit an article, so actually you are not required to enter My Work page to manage your articles, however in this page you can see a full list. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 18 of 34
Expired and pending articles In Add Article chapter we talked about Publish Date and Expire Date, suppose an article is already approved, but it s publish date is set to 2 days later, it s status is pending so you won t see this article in article list, similarly, if the expiry date of an approved article is set to 2 days ago, it s status is expired. Click Expired ( ) link in the top, you can see this page: The Expired and Pending links can be used to switch the status of articles. The Republish ( ) button can be used to publish an expired article again, UNA will set Publish date to current date, and expired date to current date plus default lifecycle. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 19 of 34
Subscriptions There are 2 kinds of subscriptions in UNA, at first, UNA allows you to publish rss feeds so your site visitors can subscibe them, 2ndly, UNA is able to subscribe to rss feeds from other vendors and pull contents to your website. Let s first discuss the ability to publish rss feeds in UNA, in the home page find and click it, you will see all available rss feeds: button A sub module named UNA-RssFeeds can also be used to publish rss feeds, it offers approximately same output as above screenshot, but it s more direct. Now let s see how to pull contents to your website by rss, click Subscriptions ( the module, you will see this page: ) link in the top of Click Add New button to add a new item: Enter the url of your rss feed, select the refresh interval and save changes, UNA will validate this rss feed to see if it s in RSS 2.0 format, if so, the name of this feed will be dislayed. When you add the 1 st rss feed, UNA will install a scheduler in Host Schedule, which runs every 10 minutes, this scheduler will check to see if any rss feed need to be refreshed. Wait about 10 minutes, then click Home ( ) link to see all articles in this rss feed are pulled to Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 20 of 34
your module: Please note only the summary of a content (a content could either be an article, a blog, a image on flickr or a video on youtube) is included in the rss, so when you click the title in UNA article list you are navigated to the content provider s website. Some rss vendors offer Category node in the rss indicates the category information of an item, BBC for example: http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/world/rss.xml UNA is able to use this data, find this option in Settings ( ) page: When check this option, UNA will check to see if the specified category exists in your module, if not exist UNA will create it, then assign this item to specified category. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 21 of 34
Flash Calendar At first let s see a screenshot: This flash application allows you to quickly browse articles in a UNA module, the hightlighed days are clickable, click it and you will see all articles published in this day: A triangle button will be placed around the current month name if there are articles in previous or next month. Below is a screenshot of the the Module Setting page, in default the Use Embed Fonts option is turned on, this ensures the text in the flash is smooth, but you must disable it if your articles contain asian texts. The Auto Play Interval defaults to Disabled, if you set it to a positive value for example 5, the flash calendar will automatically select highlighted days and show articles of this day. The Background option allows you to set the background picture for your flash calendar, available options are jpg pictures under /Desktopmodules/UltraNewsArticle/Resources/ folder, you can simply upload a new jpg to this folder to have a new option. The Animation option allows you to set the animation effect in the flash calendar, similar to Background, you can upload a new swf to /Desktopmodules/UltraNewsArticle/Resources/ folder to have a new option. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 22 of 34
Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 23 of 34
Google Ajax Search Google Ajax Search feature is an exclusive feature in UNA, you can use it to show related stuffs on google when you read an article, in The 1 st glance chapter we already see an example: If the the current article have a tag, UNA will search on google by this tag, otherwise UNA will search by article title. Some options are related to Google Ajax Search in Settings ( ) page. You can select what to be searched here, the Local Search can be used to search places in your city or area, this option is especially useful if you use UNA in community websites and most site visitors are located in same city or area, to use it you must provide your city or area name. Suppose your location is New York, and you submitted an article with the keyword of Italian restaurant, let s see what it looks like: Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 24 of 34
Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 25 of 34
Google Maps Integration Login as host user, then click Add New ( ) link to add a new article, you will find this section belove the html editor: Click Install button and confirm it, you will see this textbox: To use google maps service on your website, you should at first signup on google to get your API key, now click the sign link and enter your domain to get the API key, paste it here and click Install again, the page postbacks and you will see this message: Ok, now this extension is properly installed, please be aware once you install this extension you can use this feature in your entire DNN installation. Check the FCKEditor toolbar again, you will find a new Google Map button: Click this button to open a new browser window and see google maps. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 26 of 34
That is the 1 st time you use it, UNA just show north amercia in the center of the map, if you selected a point before UNA will set the previous point as the center and zoom it to proper scale. Then you need to locate the point you want to add, you can either manually locate it or search it. At first let s try to manually locate a point, for example, I already know Key West is the southest point of Florida, so it s not difficult to find it, just drop Florida to the center of the map and zoom it until finally find Key West: Now click Key West to add a Point, a info box will be shown above the point you selected, you can drop & drop it to make it more accurate: Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 27 of 34
Then you need to enter a message for this point and click Add Point, you will notice UNA insert a link to selected point in your article content: Save this article and read it, you can see the map link navigates to Key West on google maps with your message. You also can use the search form on google maps to search specific point: Just click a search result and press Add Point, you even don t need to enter a message because UNA will use the name displayed in search results. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 28 of 34
Manage display templates In The 1 st glance chapter we discussed how to select display template and color scheme, you need to use these options in Settings ( ) page. If all 3 templates doesn t fit your needs, you can click Manage Templates link to add your own display templates: The radio boxes in 1 st line allows you to choose a template to manage, the radio boxes in left allows you to select a file to edit, when you click a file you can see its content in the center textbox, please note you can t edit any file which belongs to Basic, Blog and Default template, why? Because when you upgrade UNA these changes will be lost, so we suggest you to use the Copy as new button to copy an core template to a new template, then you can do anything to your own template. Below files are indispensable to a display template: ArticleList.ascx -> This file determines the layout in the article list page List.Normal.html -> This file is used together with ArticleList.ascx, UNA will load this file for each Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 29 of 34
article, replace supported tokens and add to article list. ReadArticle.ascx -> This file determines the layout and controls in the article detail page. Comment.Normal.html -> If your article have comments, UNA will load this file for each comment, replace supported tokens and add to comment list. There can be multiple css files in your display template, each css will be identified as a color scheme. All display templates are saved in \DesktopModules\UltraNewsArticle\ Templates folder, you also can also use FTP to manage them. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 30 of 34
Manage email notifications UNA send emails notifications when: 1. an article is added and require approval 2. an article is approved 3. an article is rejected 4. an user is marked as trusted user 5. an trusted user is downgraded to a untrusted user The email templates are saved in \DesktopModules\UltraNewsArticle\Notification folder, now open ArticleApproved.txt in a text editor: Your articles is approved Your article "[TITLE]" on [PORTALNAME] is approved, click <a href='[link]' target='_blank'>here</a> to read it. The 1 st line will be used as email subject, other lines are used as email body, just modify it and save changes if you want to alter the email template. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 31 of 34
Obsolete articles If the Expire Date or an article is not set, this article will always be displayed, however, if you do set the expire date and and the expire date is older than current date, this article become obsolete and will no longer be displayed. An option in Settings page is related to this behavior: In default this option is turned off, if you turn it on, UNA will delete obsolete articles x days after expiration. UNA-Archives module is used to show month names which contain expired articles, obviously this module is useless to you when you turn on above option, assume you turn this option off, let s add UNA-Archives module to a page: Since UNA-Archives module is a satellite module for Ultra News Article, you need to tell it where to get data from, click Module Setting in module menu, properly choose the data source, then it should show month names which contain expired articles, here is an example: Months of current year will be directly displayed, months of previous years are grouped by year. Click a month in this list, you will be redirected to UNA page and expired articles published in this month will be listed. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 32 of 34
Profile integration When you use the default UNA display template, you can see the author s information beside the article content: If you use any of 4 modules in your website: 1. Active Forums 2. Active Social 3. Smart-Thinker Profile 4. DNN Forum These modules allow users to upload a picture as avatar, UNA is able to get the avatar and display it in About the author area. Now find below options in Settings ( ) page: Choose the profile provider, if you choose DNN Forum you should provide the Module ID as well, which is the module id of DNN Forum module. Suppose you have Smart-Thinker installed, choose Smart-Thinker Profile and save changes, now read an article again, you can see the author s avatar is displayed: In Settings ( ) page you can see a User Profile Url option, if you use any profile module, you can enter the url to see one s profile in this field use [USERID] to represent user id, then in About the author area you can see a View Profile link: Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 33 of 34
Similar to Ultra Video Gallery, UNA comes with a UNA-FreeArticleList module, you can use it in your user profile pages so it lists articles of this user, to do it please add it to your user profile page, and click Module Setting in module menu to configure it: Select Profile Integration as First List Type, and set User Key to the parameter name in url which represents user id, that s all. Copyright by bizmodules.net 2009 Page 34 of 34