The best idea for making "news" content ?

Hi people !
I made (with success) a few sites in XWD and I am so happy about Xara growing community, along with Xara growing abilities (WD7P) ...
But always I have to make some improvisation about making "news" part of site.
Maybe somebody have great decisions and different ideas and ways to solve it ?
I know that there is no ability to work with databases (like in Joomla and others), but with Xara we always have some ways to overcome it. Maybe there are some widgets or tweaks ... or connecting with some other third-party sites ?
I'm just wondering and kindly asking for different ideas ... and samples ... :-)

Are you referring to something like an RSS feed? I am sure there are many third party solutions.

There is a New York Times widget, but now that the NY Times is charging for more than 15 articles viewed a month, there might be a better news source.

There's a Coffeecup app called RSS News Flash which will put in news feeds and allow you to add your own feed. It's very easy to integrate into XWD via a placeholder and does not require a database. Check it out here: http://www.coffeecup.com/news-flash/

I am also interested in being able to post news to my site

gwpriester, I believe the news Dencuga is referring to (if I am understanding correctly) is internal company news that would be generated by someone onsite to be distributed to other employees over an intranet (i.e. promotions, current project status, etc. or at least this is what I am looking for). I have tried coffeecup but was unable to get it to import correctly into xwd and it appears they are no longer supporting the news-flash program as this link and the purchase link in the app don't work properly. I am not really a big fan of using a 3rd party reader in xwd either if possible as it doesn't make sense to me to have my data go from being local to rss-feed-widget hoster back to me for formatting, it seems somewhat counterintuitive, however it would be nice to be able to have a module to fill in that would update a placeholder with updated news in a similar fashion to the way coffeecup does this. Thank you.

Hi all- i'm new to WD7 having spent many years making websites using dodgy HTML and crafting images in packages like Serif PhotoPlus.

I've been looking into ways of creating a base website using WD7 (it makes lovely looking pages in an easy way- and with a bit of imagination and nice choice of imagery it's a winner) that can link to easily updatable dynamic pages.

As far as I can work out so far the key choices for making "news" content as queried in this thread boil down to:

Manually updating a news page by editing and re-uploading a Xara WD7 produced website (which seems like a big job for the stated goal) each time you wish to add a fact / news item

Linking to and displaying a summary of a twitter account using the twitter widget

Simply adding a link to a blog site (eg blogspot) and accepting that there will be a loss of webstyle due to the difference in appearance of the two platforms

Using a second party widget (like widget box- it'll cost you a few £$£$) and hosting the headlines from your blog page on your Xara website with a click-through for interested parties.

I wonder if any of you long-experienced Xara webmasters have a preferred solution that allows you to easilly add (preferably through a web interface) news / updates / contemporary content to a Xara WD produced base-site. Such a capacity seems like a simple requirement for a website creation product?


Any links that display your solutions would be apprecieated!


Mark

What kind of site are you adding news to? Will adding news enhance the site or just be a pointless distraction?

When I want news I go to a news site.

Hi,
I would go search for a Free Scripting page and do a search for PHP or Javascript file for News or Blogs and get one that suits your needs and download it and modify to you needs the use the script iin a place holder. That would give what you want exactly and you could use for other purposes. By doing that all you would have to ass to your site daily is the news files. I did see one for aa Faltfile news script (doesn't require a database file)
JIm

My preferred option is to use iframe to a blogger blog such as in www.energydanceandfitness

As you can see it is fairly easy to match the blogger site to your website. That way the customer just updates the blog and it is instantly updated on the website. And by the way if you want to hide the blogger bar at the top just create a rectangle the same colour as the background over it in webdesigner.

Am I correct, then, in assuming that Web Designer can only create static pages and not something that would be regularly changing, like a string of new stories or updates, or a collection of entries on something that might be based on a database?

I'd like to create a revamped website for (www.desperationmorale.com) my site, which is basically stuck in the 20th century, so that I don't have to constantly redesign the pages every time i want to add something (especially for www.desperationmorale.com/worldrecent.html), but it sounds like I'd be doing the same thing with Web Designer that I am currently doing with FrontPage 2003. I had kind of hoped that Web Designer might include a user friendly way to include this sort of content.

I am afraid that answer is yes ... and this is the only thing that Xara has problem with ...
There are many ways (what we are trying to reach here) to emulate working with databases ... but it is still static page :-(

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dencuga

I am afraid that answer is yes ... and this is the only thing that Xara has problem with ...
There are many ways (what we are trying to reach here) to emulate working with databases ... but it is still static page :-(

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Not a problem but the planned design of how Web Designer creates web pages.

Surely that makes it a problem, then, since most websites now are dynamic in one way or another? Even blogs are dynamic.

Actually most professionally designed web pages are fixed width to ensure that what is designed is what a viewer sees.

Dynamic pages shift and change layout and formatting.