News Desk Plug-in for AbleCommerce

This plug-in allows you to manage news on your AbleCommerce store. The news articles can be divided into different categories for organized access and display. They can have different statuses like Draft, Reviewed, Ready and Published. News articles can also be set to expire after a certain expiry date. They can be searched and sorted based on their creation date, last modified date, published date or expiry date. Admin users can preview the news that are not yet published. On the store side you can display news in various ways, for example,  latest news, news by category, all news, or details of a particular news item.

You can get the News Desk Plug-in from here.

Screen Shots

Image 1 on the left side shows the default page of “News Desk”.  In the screen-shot it is displaying eight news items belonging to three different categories.

You can go the the NewsDesk main page using the new navigation item ‘Add-Ons’ in your top navigation in merchant admin.

Image 2 on left side shows three News Categories named BBC News, CNN News and CNET News. On the right side of the screen you can see an “Add Category Panel”. From this panel you can add new news categories.

Image 3 on the left side shows the page from where you can create news items. You have to select the category the news items is to be placed in.  You can set the expiry date and news status along with news summary and content.

Image 4 on left side shows the latest news items on the store side. The ConLib control used to display this is ‘LatestNews’ control. You can use this control anywhere on your store where you want the latest news displayed. There are various properties of this control that you can use to control its display. You can also make use of the CSS to change its look and feel completely.

Image 5  on the left is displaying news in a categorized manner in your store. The ConLib control used to display news in this manner is ‘NewsCategories’. There are various properties of this control that you can use to control its display. You can also make use of the CSS to change its look and feel completely.

Image 6 shows the news details page. This page contains the details of a particular news that you have clicked. The ConLib control used to display this is ‘NewsDetails’ control.

Image 7 shows the news items of “CNN News” Category. The ConLib control used to display this is ‘CategoryNews’ control. You can use this control anywhere on your store where you want to display news of a particular category.

Search News Image shows a search news box on the left side of above image. When you want to search a perticular news, you have to write the search keyword in search news box and click on search button. The news that contained this keyword will be listed on the right side as shown in the image.

Search News Paging image shows paging when the news items exceeds to the specified limit. The default page size is 3.

Installation

To install the News Desk Plug-in get the latest version from here. The zip file you get will contain the following files and folders

• ReadMe.pdf
• WebSite
• InstallScripts

For installation you need to follow the instructions given below.

• Before starting installation take a backup of following files in your store.
  – Admin/menu.sitemap
  – Admin/breadcrumbs.sitemap
• Copy all files from Website folder to your store where AbleCommerce is installed. Copy all files to the corresponding directories in your store. For example copy everything from Website/ConLib/ folder to ConLib folder of your store and so on.
  Please make sure that you take backup of any existing file that gets updated.
  Note: – Please keep in mind in 7.0.3 scriptlets can be theme specific, by default we are assuming that you are not using theme specific scriptlets so we will put them in default location under App_Data folder. In case if you are using theme specific scriptlets then you will need to move scriptlets available with this extension under App_Themes/YourTheme/ folder.
• If you previously customized Admin/menu.sitemap and Admin/breadcrumbs.sitemap files you will have to manually update these files. Otherwise you can simply replace these files with the files provided in the News Desk installation.
• Run the SQL scripts on your database from InstallScripts/DB/ folder. As a precaution always take a backup of your database before running any SQL scripts.Installation of News Desk Plug-in is complete. You can start using News Desk by going to the ‘Add-Ons-> NewsDesk ‘ menu in merchant admin.

Store Side Deployment

On your store, you can make use of the features made available by NewsDesk by using the ConLib controls provided by NewsDesk.

To display latest news you can use the [[ConLib:NewsDesk\LatestNews]] control in your scriptlets.

• Caption property is used to show the a caption header for latest news. The default caption is ‘Latest News’.
• MaxItems property controls the maximum number of news items displayed. The default value is 5.
• MaxDaysOld indicates the number of days back form today for which the news items are displayed. The default value is -1 which indicates no limit.

NOTE: Only the published and non-expired news items are displayed on the store.

To display news by categories you can use the [[ConLib:NewsDesk\NewsCategories]] control in your scriptlets.

• Caption property is used to show the a caption header . The default caption is ‘News Categories’.
• ShowCaption indicates whether to display the caption header or not. The default value is ‘true’.
• ShowEmtpyCategories indicates whether to display categories that contain no news items.The default value is ‘false’.
• ShowNewsItems indicates whether to display news items for each category or not. The default value is false.
• ShowNewsItemSummary indicates whether to display summary of the news items or not. The default value is false.
• MaxNewsItemsPerCategory indiates the number of news items to display for each category if news items are set to be displayed. The default value is 0 which means no limit.

To display details of a news item, use [[ConLib:NewsDesk\NewsDetails]] control in your scriptlets.[[ConLib:NewsDesk\NewsDetails NewsItemId=”0″ ShowTitle=”true” ShowSummary=”false” ShowDescription=”true” ShowDate”true” DateToDisplay=”PUBLISHED” ShowRelatedLinks=”true” ]]

• NewsItemId property indicates the id of news item to display. The default value is 0.
• ShowTitle property indicates whether to show the news title or not. The default value is ‘true’.
• ShowSummary indicates whether to display news summary or not. The default value is ‘true’.
• ShowDescription indicates whether to display news detailed description or not. The default value is ‘true’.
• ShowDate indicates whether to display news date or not. The default value is ‘false’.
• DateToDisplay tells which date to display. Valid values are “PUBLISHED”, “LASTMODIFIED” and “CREATED. The default value is “PUBLISHED”.
• ShowRelatedLinks indicates whether to display related links at the bottom or not. The default is ‘true’.

To display news items of a particular category you can use the [[ConLib:NewsDesk\ CategoryNews]] control in your scriptlets.

• NewsCategoryId takes the id of a particular “News Category”. Only “News Items” that belong to this category would be displayed on the page where you put “CategoryNews” control. The default value is 0 means no category news to display.
• ShowNewsItemSummary indicates whether to display summary of the news items or not. The default value is ‘true’.
• ShowNewsItemDetails indicates whether to display news detailed description or not. The default value is ‘false’

To display search box for news items, [[ConLib:NewsDesk\SearchNews]] can be used control in your scriptlets.

• Caption property is used to show the caption header for the search box. The default caption is ‘Search News’.