Managing Categories

Applies to: News Pro 1.0 - News Manager

Introduction

This article discusses the specifics for adding news categories in News Pro and how you can utilize this tool to do special category tasks and management.

Creating A New Category

News Pro categories allow you to add news categories that are, in turn, displayed as navigational links on your web site. Each category name is limited to a set number of characters in order that your web site will maintain a uniform appearance. When you type the name of the category, enter it as you want it to appear on your web site; e.g. first letter capitalized, all caps or all lower case.

As you can see from the image below, you can also select the Type and View of a category. The "Type" is used to indicate if the news category will be text (displayed in your web site) or if it is a PDF document you will be uploading to the system. Hint: once you create a category, its type cannot be edited. The "View" is a setting which allows you the option to keep it private; meaning, only your subscribers have access to the content. Make the category "Private" to prevent public access without a subscriber login or "Public" to leave it available to all your web site visitors (including non-subscribers).

By default, each new category will be added to the last position. Therefore, you may need to reorder the Position values to tell News Pro what order to display the news category links on your web site.

Editing An Existing Category

Working with an existing category, you can change/edit the category name, position, status and view.

To change the name of the category, place your cursor in the textbox with the category you wish to edit. Delete the old text and enter the new text you wish to add. Make sure to click the, "Edit categories" button at the bottom of the screen to save your changes.

You can also change the order in which the link is listed. For example: if you have a category named, "Sports" that you want to list first and a category named, "Community News" that you want to list second, then you would set the position values of each like the following. Set the Position value of Sports to 1 and Community News to 2. Be sure to click the, "Edit categories" button to save your changes.

Now when you go to your web site, you will see the categories that you edited, in the order you specified. What if I don't see them in the order I specified? Go back to your News Pro interface and be sure both categories have a Status of "Active". If you see the categories, but they are not in order, go back and be sure you entered only numbers in the Position textbox of each category.

Hint: you cannot edit the position value of an inactive category. Again, News Pro categories are exclusive, you cannot edit them. Once you create a category of type "Text", you can only add text, you cannot add PDF content.

Deleting A Category

Deleting a category is simple. Click the red delete icon at the right of the category you wish to delete. Upon doing so, you will be asked to confirm your selection.

WARNING: if you choose to delete a category, you will permanently delete all of the news content under that category. This action cannot be undone.

Hint: you CANNOT delete the Late Breaking news category as it is a default news category and used in several special functions on your web site. You can, however, make it inactive; this allows you the option to not use this feature.