Release

Now available: News – new community category type


We added a new type of category that you can add to your community, meet News. This category type can best be described as a communication and information sending category as your company has full control over its contents.

Characteristics

  • Only moderators, community managers and administrators can create topics in this category
  • The default sorting order of this category is set to ‘Newest first’ - this will sort the list after latest published content and not after latest activity (this excludes sticky topics which will always be on the top)
  • Registered users and super users can not post topics in this category, if you want to add a topic of your user to this category you can do so by moving the topic in the Control environment

Example usecases

Here are some examples on how and when to use a news category

  • For official updates from your company
  • For product release notes and changes (like we do here in the ‘News & platform updates’ category on inSpired)
  • For your company blogposts that contain roundups, inspiration and interviews

Create a news category

Creating a news category, or converting a default category to a news category, is a piece of cake: Go to Control > Platform > Community and either add a new category, or edit an existing one.

Category type: News

Over time we will make changes to the UI of this News category (much like ideation and knowledge base categories have a different UI) and to the way topics are being displayed in the topic lists.

We hope you like this new category type and we look forward to see it in action in your communities, if you have a great use case please do share it with us in the comments below.

I am a new moderator to an inSided platform, and I see old posts tagged as news: 

 

But I do not see this option when I’m creating a new post. How to I tag a post as News rather than Question, Conversation, or Idea?

 

Thank you in advance for any help!


Hi Sam,

Welcome to our community! Good question, I can see why you might be a bit confused by this.

In the opening post, Yoeri described “News” as a dedicated category type. This means you can create News categories which follow a slightly different logic than the default discussion categories. So this is about different types of categories and not different types of content.

We (currently) have these different content types on the community:

  • Conversations: The regular community content type
  • Questions: Here you can mark a valid answer
  • Articles: Richer, more blog-style content type with hero banners and custom article labels
  • Ideas: Here users can vote on ideas and you can assign a custom status to that idea

What you are looking at in your screenshot is merely a label to an article - within the article content type, you can define your own labels (News, Release, Announcement, etc.). These labels function more as an additional indicator what can be found within the article. This article here uses the label “Release”, within our own News and Announcements category overview, you will find all sorts of different labels used for articles.

So when you create a new article, you will see a free text field for the article label. This is where you could enter News in order to re-create what you are seeing in the screenshot.

Hope this helps!


Hello,

Is it possible to add a Community category that has been setup this way to a Featured Topics type widget and have it automatically update the widget based on what is the latest?

Maybe Featured Topics is not the correct thing to use, basically it would be good to have the 3 latest articles display with a Show More button that leads to the category. Whenever a new article gets updated the widget displays the latest 3 articles.

This would remove the manual step of updating the Featured Topics widget every time there is a new article.

Thanks

 

 

 


Hi @KevyM 👋,

This sounds like a good use case for our Dynamic Content Widget (still in beta):

You can edit the number of items the widget will display, the content type, as well as configure how this is sorted. Right now, you can’t define which category you want to feature topics from but we’re planning to improve this widget and add more options next year.

I’ve made this available on your community. You can find it in the list of widgets in Customize mode.


Thanks! @olimarrio  We will give it a go.