Implementation of a news box on the home page.

[See also the page on RSS News under the LIGO e-Lab (it should eventually be moved to the front page, since it could be used for the whole site and all e-Labs, not jut LIGO). ]

We currently have a category of items called news that can be entered just like references, FAQs, and glossary items. I defined a special news item ?News_cosmic_status? as the news item that we will always contain the status we want to display on the home page. It also includes a date for displaying and an expiration date. Each e-Lab can have its own News_(elabname)_status.

I added two files getNewsStatus.jsp and getMeta.jsp and made a test home as www13.i2u2.org:8080/elab/cosmic/home_news.jsp

getNewsStatus.jsp looks up the meta data associated with News_cosmic_status and displays the meta data ?description? if it successfully finds it, and the current date is after the display date and before the expiration date.

home.jsp and teacher.jsp includes getNewsStatus.jsp on the right column. If there is no news, it just remains blank.

Because home.jsp include elab_name.jsp, but not common.jsp, I made an abbreviated version of common.jsp called getMeta.jsp that just has that function and the other necessary parts it needs to work.

This method relies on Bob Peterson maintaining the news item with timely information and setting the expiration date so news items don?t get stale. He uses the web interface provided with controlReferences.jsp that requires a special password.

We could consider adding a second more general item called News_status that has the status for all e-Labs and pull in both.

I think this is good stop-gap measure to provide a news box until Mihael comes up with a much cleaner solution. We discussed it in the telecon on April 4th and I made some minor mods, but it is ready to go.

I added it to the teacher page as well. I am going to put this in CVS and it should rollout on Friday, April 6th.

-- Main.LizQuigg - 04 Apr 2007

We have something which does this on the LIGO prototype site, and it also produces an RSS feed. I can demonstrate, and we can talk about how one might port it or emulate it. RSS is a great way to get the news out. Besides browsers like Firefox supporting it, Google's new gadgets on iGoogle (the service which lets you customize your google search page) automatically recognizes RSS feeds.

(I've also learned how to make iGoogle gadgets for other things, so a status gadget would be fairly easy to implement.)

-- Main.EricMyers - 17 May 2007

Add item to newsbox:

• Log in as admin.
• Continue on into the e-lab.
• Click 'notifications' icon at the top.
• Click 'Send notifications' or 'Send notifications to teachers only'.
• Fill in form, and click 'Send'. *