Do you have some kind of announcement or news to share with fellow Network members, as well as the broader public?  News items are often a great way of doing this.  News items have their own panel prominently displayed on many locations throughout the site:

As you might expect, the latest news is displayed in reverse date order.  News items also have their own section. Furthermore, news published on this site is available for syndication to other sites. Last but not least, news items are also a major component of the Network's weekly newsletter, the HRN Bulletin.  Let's go through an example to see how easy it is an add a news item. Go to a folder where you have permission to add content. You can do this in your member folder. To see your member folder, make sure you are logged in, and click on the my folder link in the personal bar in the upper right hand corner of the site:

Once you have clicked on my folder you will be taken to the part of the website where your folder is stored, displaying your folder and its contents:

To learn more about your folder read this.  To add a news item, click on news item from the add new item menu:

The new news item is immediately created, albeit with no content yet.  The fields to be filled out are:

• Short Name: Depending on your preferences, you may have the option of entering a short name. This identifier will become part of the news item's web address.  As the instructions on the form say, a short name should not contain spaces, upper case, underscores or other special characters. However it can contain a hyphen, as seen in the example below. If you do not enter a short name, the site will generate one for you—however it will look like something a computer and not a human has generated!
• Headline: The title of the item. This will appear in the Bulletin so keep it brief but descriptive.
• Lead-in:  The introductory section of an item.  This is displayed in the news section, and is designed to entice the reader to click on the item to read the full story. If the news item is very brief, this may be the news itself.
• Body text: The major component of the item.

This is an example of entering a news item:

When you have finished, click save, and you will see something similar to this:

Tips

• If you create a news item and decide you no longer want it, you must manually delete it, even if you have just created it and it has nothing in it.
• Don't forget to add keywords to the news item properties!
• To have the news item appear in the news panel and appear in the HRN Bulletin, you need to submit it for publication.

Adding attachments to news items

If you have something that should be attached to the news, for instance some kind of document, you need to add the attachment as a seperate item in your folder.  You may then refer to the attachment from within your news item.  You can add a link to it, for instance—using Epoz makes it easy to do this.  Viewers can then read the news item, and click to view the attachment.  You can have as many attachments as you need.  In addition to reading about Epoz, see these tutorial pages to learn more about adding suitable attachments: adding OpenOffice documents, adding Word documents, adding images, and adding files.