What it is
The College News Importer is a Department Web Framework feature that watches the College of Arts & Sciences website (artsci.washington.edu) and automatically pulls in new articles that have been tagged with your department by our marketing specialists. The idea behind this feature is to help you add fresh content to your department website and get ideas for future stories to develop.
How it works
The College News Importer will initially add all articles from the last two years (with a maximum of 50 articles) that have been tagged with your department. All imported articles are automatically tagged as "In the Press" and other News Categories that align with categories used on the College website. Imported articles also pull in the first image associated with the article (if one is available). Each article is imported only once. It does not update if the story is changed on the College website -- this allows you to edit how they are tagged, modify/add to the content, and add additional images without your changes being overwritten if the source article changes. You can also unpublish individual imported articles if you don't want them to appear on your site.
There are two types of news articles that will be imported -- College articles and External articles.
Imported College articles will include:
- the article title
- a photo (if available)
- 1-2 paragraphs of the original article to serve as a "teaser"
- a button linking back to the full article on the College of Arts & Sciences website
Imported External articles will include
- the title of the external news blurb as it was added to the College of Arts & Sciences website
- a photo (if available)
- a very short 1-2 sentence summary
- a link back to the original article with the name of the source publication (such as "Featured on The Seattle Times")
Articles that are imported to your website will not be automatically featured in areas that require curation. Depending on your site's setup, they may not appear on the homepage or your featured news page. They will be listed on your Recent News, News Archive, and Manage Content pages. When you find imported news articles that you want to highlight on your homepage or featured news pages, you can edit the article and promote it to those areas of your website just as you would with any other news story you created.
Things to watch for
- There may be duplicate content imported to your site if the College of Arts & Sciences website added one of your News stories as an External article on their site. Keep an eye out for imported articles about News that you've written.
- New articles will be imported once per day. If you see an article on the College of Arts & Sciences website that was just added, please wait 24 hours for it to be imported to your site.
- If photos are available for the article on the College of Arts & Sciences website, only the first image will be imported to your site.
- If a video is attached to an article on the College of Arts & Sciences website, it will not be imported to your site.
- Articles will have to be edited to add People Involved, Fields of Interest, and News Category tags that are custom to your site.
- Unpublish articles that you don't want to appear. If you delete them, they will be regenerated on the next import.
Articles must be tagged with your department on the College of Arts & Sciences website to be available for import. See your department's page on the college website (the “more info” link) to see what articles are included in your department’s feed.
How to get it
Please write to asweb@uw.edu to request that this feature be added to your department website.