Articles are a little known feature of Community Server which adds some very simple content management facilities to your site. When I say basic, I do mean basic. These articles don’t appear in search, nor are they automatically linked to by any part of Community Server (apart from in the Control Panel). To link to articles you need to add the links yourself – this could be from blog, forum posts etc. Or by adding a link to the navigation. However they do make adding and updating additional content pages on your website, in keeping with the look and feel of your community, very easy. Examples of pages that you might add to your community using Articles are About Us, Terms of Service, Community Rules.
To create an article you must be a System Administrator. Open up Control Panel. In the System Administration box, select Site Administration. Under the Site Content tab, select Manage / Create Articles. To create a new article, press the Create new article button.
When the Create Article page opens you have three fields to fill in.
When you’re ready, press “save changes” to save your article press save to create your article and you’ll be taken to the page containing your article.
But hang on, this article doesn’t look how I want it to look. Why doesn’t it look like the rest of the site and have the content in a white box with a border at the top. You can fix that by adding the appropriate HTML to your article to render the common content box – see my article on common content boxes for more details on that. CS not rendering the common content box out of the box is actually quite useful as it means you can chose on the style of the common content box uses, add multiple common content boxes to one article or break free and go with your own style.
There are two ways you can edit an article, but both require you to be a system administrator.
Once you’ve opened up the edit page for an article, you can edit the article in exactly the same way you did when creating a new article.
To delete an article, follow the steps above to edit an article, but instead of editing the article and saving it, press the ‘clear’ button.
Alex,
Thanks for bringing this in, works great...One issue, I can navigate right to the page without logging in. Is there a way to set visibility rules?
Jason L.
You cannot as such set visibility restrictions on articles. You might however be able to use the <authorization> section of web.config to restrict access to specific articles.
You could also restrict the navigation item so it only appears to users in certain roles.