News

Aiir makes it easy to manage news content on your website and mobile apps with our dedicated News app.

The layout of pages is taken care of, articles are automatically archived, and there's easy integration with external feeds.

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Categories

News articles in Aiir are assigned to categories. So before you can create an article, you'll first need to create a category.

The Categories section of News lists all of the categories in your organisation.

You may have more than one category in your organisation with the same name. For example, you might have a "Local News" category for one station, and another "Local News" category for another station. So that you can internally tell them apart, you can give them a label, which will appear in brackets after its name.

Each category can be added to one or more stations. When a category is added to a station, its articles become available on that station's website and mobile app.

When you create a new category, you'll be asked where the articles will come from, with three options: we'll write our own articles, an RSS feed, or an Aiir partner feed.

If you'd like to pull articles in from an external feed that you already have access to, choose "an RSS feed". You'll need to have been given permission to republish their content. If the feed contains the content of each article, the articles will have pages on your website or app. If it doesn't, your website or app will link out to the third party website who hosts the feed.

Categories which are fed from external feeds cannot be selected when creating a news article. The articles are automatically populated from the feed and the content and the order of the articles must remain synchronised with the feed. You do however have the option to 'block' specific articles from appearing.

Creating and editing a news article

Before you can create a news article, make sure you've created a category.

To create a new news article, head to the Articles page (where you search for articles) and tap New Article at the top.

A new news article requires a title, abstract and content.

If you'd like to work on an article and save it without it appearing publicly on a website or mobile app, select the "Draft" option. You can still preview a draft once it has been saved. Tap the "Open article page" button and the page's URL will include a parameter which allows you to view the page which wouldn't otherwise be accessible.If an article has "Draft" selected but is scheduled to go live, it will not go live. You must un-select the draft option first.

You should select at least one category for an article to appear in. If you have access to multiple categories, you can select more than one. If you do this, order the categories with the most relevant first.

The "abstract" for an article is a summary which appears in search engines, on social networks and as the first paragraph of the article itself.

The content for an article can include almost anything you'd like, including images, audio, tweets and other 3rd party embeds.

The embargo and archive options let you choose when an article will go live and when it will be removed from the news index and category pages.

Each article has a main image, which will be shown on index pages where it is linked to, and in the body of the article itself. If you like, you can serve different images to social networks when it's linked to from Facebook and X. If you don't need to vary the image for those networks, there's no need to select the same image again. Pay attention to the size requirements though, to ensure the correct image is served as the thumbnail where you embed it.

You can post a news article to social media after it is saved for the first time, if:

Tap the button at the top of the page. If the article is accessible via multiple websites, you'll be prompted to select a website first.

The first page of the News app lets you search all of the articles in your organisation which you have access to. By default, you'll see articles in order of most recently updated first.

The controls at the top of the page let you search by name and slug, or filter by category and state. You can tap 'More' to see further options for filtering and ordering.

The list of articles shows you (from left to right):

  • A checkbox, for selecting multiple articles. If you select an article, you'll see some buttons appear at the bottom of the screen which let you delete, archive and un-archive.
  • The title of the article, with its categories underneath. You can click a category to go to a page which shows just that category's articles, and lets you change their order.
  • The article's status. It appears in green for published, yellow for embargoed (upcoming), grey for archived, and white if it is a draft.
  • Who created the article and when, and who last updated the article and when.
  • A menu button, which lets you duplicate, archive, un-archive and delete an article.

Archiving

Archiving is an important concept of news articles. 

Archived articles are not removed from your website; they're no longer visible on the news index pages of your website or mobile app, but they can still be reached either directly (if you have the URL) or in search.

Without archiving, your news index page would grow indefinitely, so we automatically set an archive date when creating a new article. You can change the default period in the Settings section.

If you need to completely remove an article, you must delete it.

You can quickly archive any article by going to the Articles section (search page), locate the article, tap the menu button on the right and select Archive.

You can select multiple articles to archive at once using the checkboxes on the left, and then select the 'Archive' button appears at the bottom of the screen.

How articles appear on your website

The news app takes care of the layout of elements of articles on your website. 

For example, the date the article is created appears at the top. However if you've set a start date/time for an article, we'll show that instead, so people can't see when you actually created it.

Alongside the date we add small social sharing buttons. 

If you choose to show the author of the article, that will appear below the date.

The article's main image appears either full width (by default) or you can change it to appear to the side.

The abstract appears next, followed by the body (content) of the article.

At the bottom of the article there is:

  • Social sharing buttons
  • A space where you can add custom content - you can set this up organisation-wide, or override it on a category basis
  • Links to other recent articles in the same category - you can disable this organisation-wide or on a category basis
  • Comments, if enabled for an article

You can't change the order of these elements.

If you wish, you can have an ad appear mid-article, after a chosen number of paragraphs. This can be set up in the Settings section of News.

Showing news content from external feeds

Our News app is capable of including content from third party sources.

Read more about how this works.

Feeding your news content in via third party software

We've built support for the following third party software products, so that you can push your news content from their product to our platform.

Myriad News

Myriad News supports publishing articles directly to Aiir, marking them as a draft, ready for you to publish once you have checked them over and added further attributes.

More information is available in the Settings section. You should contact your support representative at  P Squared to find out more about this feature.

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