Linking Overview

Linking to the news in your site is one way to serve archives of relevant news articles. Once you form the code required to display news in your site, as will be demonstrated in the following pages, your task will be finished. Once correctly incorporated, the News Release System will continue to incorporate up-to-date news content based on the parameters you selected without additionally work or maintenance on your part. The page is dynamically generated each and every time a visitor views your site, so your site will never fall behind in presenting the most recent news releases.

Linking to the news calls a script which is part of the News Releases' Content Management System that dynamically generates the HTML code to display news content, either as a list of the selected articles or as a single news release.

This method of incorporating news content in your site carries with it several advantages:

1. Selection of News Content: You do not have to serve all the most recent news releases in the system, but you also have the ability to serve specific sets of the news. This includes selecting by school or college, displaying only the releases relevant to your school, selecting by category, displaying those releases relating to a a topic. Additionally, you can select articles by a month, year, or even by specific keywords. Also, linking allows you to select a specific article, rather than a list of articles.
2. Automatically Generated Lists: The embedded news releases are displayed as lists of titles with a hyperlink to the article. Clicking on the link automatically display the article with the look and feel of your school or college's pages by using your templates. Your visitor will not only be able to easily browse these releases, but will see the article in the design of your site.
3. Multiple Selection of Sets: Linking to news allows you to specify multiple selectors (school, category, year, etc.) at the same time to further narrow the selection. This allows you to make lists of all relevant articles from a specific year, or all articles containing a specific keyword from a specific school or college. This flexibility allows you the most variety of sets to display to suit your needs.

However, linking has several disadvantages in relation to the other method of serving news content, embedding:

1. Unlimited Number of Releases: Embedded news content has the ability to select a set number of most current releases from a selected set. Linking lacks this ability. It displays in chronological order all relevant news releases. Depending on what set of articles you are selecting, this list can be very long.
2. Stand-Alone Page: Linking to the news creates a stand-alone page, based on the original "design.html" page you created. It contains the navigational and design elements you included in this page, but otherwise is devoid of any changeable content. The page is generated every time a visitor clicks on the link and short of creating new updated templates, the only changes that happen these linked pages are when new news content is added to the system. If you wish to have a page that contains editable content or news content side by site with other material on your site, embedding the news is a better option.

Proceed to Select the Script to begin the process of linking to the news in your site.