Adding News Articles to the HEP Group Website

There are two main ways to add news articles to the HEP group website:

1. Adding a news item to the Physics Dept. News & Events feed;
2. Creating a .news-public file in the /unix/www/html/news/ directory.

The recommended method is to add items to the Departmental news feed, since that ensures the article appears UCL-wide.

Instructions for both methods are given below.

Adding to the Physics Dept. News & Events news feed

To add news items to the Departmental news feed, each news item needs to be submitted through the Drupal CMS interface. This can only be carried out by someone with the required Departmental website editing permissions: at present this includes Bonita Carboo and Shanice Thomas.

To add an article, the following information is required:

Title (100 characters max)

This will serve as the link from the news feed, page h1 header and URL.

A Featured Image (scalable to 767px width by 480px height)

This will serve as the icon image in the news feed and the page image on the news item.

A Date

This can be future or past dated and the order of news items in the feed will be chronological. It is recommended to use the date the article is submitted.

Content intro/summary (280 characters max)

This should summarise the news item and serve as an abstract it will display in the news feed, on the news item in a grey box underneath the title and serve as your google metadata.

Article Content

Approximately 200 words is recommended as a good starting point for news content. This can contain links to other pages.

Article Tags and Subjects

As a minimum, the article should be associated with the Subject “High energy physics” so that it appears when searching for news specific to HEP. In addition, the article can be tagged to appear in other research group, departmental or faculty news feeds.

Once the news article is listed on the departmental news page, there is an automatic script, uclnewssearch.sh, that will pull this news content from the departmental news feed and create a news snippet on the HEP web server pointing to the main article. This is in the form of a dated *.news-public file. Speaking of which...

Adding items directly to the HEP web server

If you don't want the news article to appear in the Departmental news feed, articles can be added directly to the news directory on the HEP web server: this can be found at /unix/www/html/news/ on plus1.

The filename needs to begin with the full 8-digit date for the news article, followed by a few words of descriptive text before the extension, so 20220303_ExampleNewsArticle.news-public. The date at the start — in YearMonthDay format — is important since its how the PHP news script that collates articles orders them correctly. Once created, the article then needs to be moved into the subdirectory in /unix/www/html/news/ corresponding to the correct date.

Each news article is just a text file containing a snippet of HTML and with the extension .news-public or .news: use the extension .news-public if you want the article to appear in the news feed on the group public homepage, or .news if it just contains information for the group; this will then appear on the group local homepage. At a bare minimum, the snippet should be enclosed in opening <article class="news"> and closing </article> tags.

To replicate the structure of central UCL news articles, the full article HTML structure is as follows:

<article class="news">
<div class="feed__image">
<a href="https://link.to.main.article/">
<img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://link.to.image.url/>
</a>
</div>
<div class="feed__text-content">
<h3>
<a href="https://link.to.main.article">
Main Article Title
</a>
</h3>
<p>
Main article snippet text.
<br>
<time>Date of article</time></p>
</div>
</article>

To make the process of writing article files considerably easier, a script has been written — scripts/writeNewsArticle.sh — that automates the creation of a .news-public file. This takes as input a text file containing definitions for each of the required fields and generates the HTML snippet with the correct filename. An example input file, articleTemplate.txt, can be duplicated in order to speed up the creation of news articles. This has the following content:

#!/bin/bash

# Date of article in YEAR-MONTH-DAY format YYYY-MM-DD

declare -a DATE=("2022-03-03")

# Article title - optional

declare -a TITLE=("Mini particle accelerator a step closer to being realised")

# Article image URL - optional

declare -a IMAGE=("https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/sites/news/files/styles/
large_image/public/plasmacellscropped.jpg?itok=oTDAKP3r")

# Link to main article - optional

declare -a LINK=("https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/mar/
mini-particle-accelerator-step-closer-being-realised")

# Main article text

declare -a ARTICLE=(
"Mini particle accelerators are a step closer to being realised after a 
new study co-led by UCL researchers showed it would be possible to 
accelerate millions of bunches of electrons per second using plasma waves."
)

This content can be copied into your own text file, articleText.txt (or whatever name you choose) in order to write your own news article. The .news-public file can then be generated by calling:

/unix/www/html/news/scripts/writeNewsArticle.sh -v articleText.txt

The file articleText.txt can be in any directory — the script will move it into the correct one — with the correct field definitions given in the example above.