Newswire FAQs
Will all of my stories be included in the Newswire?
Most likely not, but this depends upon how your site is configured to the Newswire. In most cases it is recommended that you create a category on your site named "Newswire." Any story that is categorized as "Newswire" will then be pulled into the Newswire for other campus units to republish. This also allows you to self-select your best content with widest reader interest to share with the larger campus community.
I categorized a story as "Newswire", but it is not being imported. Why?
In most cases, missing stories are the result of a publish order issue. The Newswire import process scans your site from newest to oldest post based on publish date. Imports end when they find a post that has already been imported. If your most recent post in Newswire has a publish date that is later than the publish date of the missing story, then the missing story will never be imported.
To avoid this issue you should always aim to categorize stories for Newswire at the time they are published.
If you still find yourself needing to push an older story to Newswire, there is a work around. Simply change the publish date of the story that didn't import so that it is the most recent post in your site. If you'd like to keep the original publish date, feel free to change it back once you see it appearing in Newswire. Imports happen every hour, on the hour. Making the date edits around that schedule is recommended.
We hope to eliminate this issue by making imports more flexible in the future.
Why is this better than copying and pasting an article?
Misspellings and factual mistakes sometimes happen. When an article is republished on your site through the Newswire, any updates made by the original publisher to the story's body will be reflected on your own site. Also, the centralized newswire.ncsu.edu interface provides a single location to see what's been published across campus. This is more convenient than frequently checking multiple websites across campus. Sites that republish content from another site by copying and pasting can be negatively impacted by Google and search engines. The Newswire mitigates this penalty by how it copies stories and alerts Google to a story's original source.
What if I want to edit a story before it's published?
The body of a story republished through Newswire can't be edited. However, you can change the title, excerpt, and featured image to better resonate with your site's primary audience.
When I add a story to a collection, is it automatically published on my site?
Yes and no. When setting up the Newswire on your site you can choose whether you'd like a new story to auto publish or to be saved as a draft. If a newly downloaded story is saved as a draft, someone will have to log in to your WordPress site and publish it.
Does the Newswire work with all WordPress themes?
Yes, to some degree. The Newswire was developed with interoperability in mind, and basic stories should display without error across almost all WordPress themes. However, stories that have unique designs or heavily rely upon shortcodes may not render correctly. In such situations it is recommended that you redirect the users to the originally published story rather than attempting to republish it on your own site.
How does the Newswire handle the use of shortcodes within a story?
When the Newswire is setup on a site, stories can be set to retain all shortcodes or all shortcodes can be stripped out of the story. Shortcodes within University Communications-created themes will generally render without problems on other UComm-created themes. UComm also has a published list of shortcodes, their intended uses, and supported parameters. This will allow other theme developers to implement commonly used shortcodes within their own themes while ensuring that future UComm themes will be able to render older stories.
Will the Newswire work with a CMS other than WordPress?
Yes, but special development work will need to be performed. The Newswire uses the WordPress REST API to download stories from contributors; however, additional API connectors can be written if necessary. The Newswire server outputs an API with a custom schema. Newly supported CMSes will need to download, parse, and store the data provided through the Newswire API.