Wikidot Community

If your "news" are Your content of Your website - why not use the "blog: " category ( or "news:") as we do it here on the frontpage and on the german community http://user-gemeinschaft.wikidot.com/ ?
You need only 4 pages as a minimum:
"blog:_start" - overview of all blog entries - or a default-category: http://user-gemeinschaft.wikidot.com/start-blog which uses standard _template
"blog:_template" - the live template like http://user-gemeinschaft.wikidot.com/blog:_template
"blog:xyz " the "Blog"-Entries itself - created with auto-parenting and tags by using the right column button.
"blog:_incldue" - the right column part in -template and Blgo:" entry - http://user-gemeinschaft.wikidot.com/blog:_include

You have to cxhange the links perhaps to your site.
Notice the blogroll of other wikidot site atg the right side down…

One way to manage this is for a dataform to be put into a live template page for your news category which I would recommend you autonumber. That makes it quick for you to then add new items, upload photos etc in a single step. Then you could put a ListPages module on your start page which displays the most recent news items with the full items and history on a different page on the site.

One example is shown below which lists the title of the 4 most recent news items here with the full list and text on the notieboard page. You could of course have some or all of the text of the new item on your homepage as well.

[[module ListPages category="noticeboard" limit="4" order="created_at desc" separate="false" prependLine="||~ Date ||~ Title ||" appendLine="||||||~ ||"]]
|| %%date|%d/%m/%y%% || %%title_linked%% || 
[[/module]]

The combination of dataforms, live templates and ListPages makes this very powerful.

To display the notices on the noticeboard page you need to add a ListPages module. The full steps I used to display the notices on the page here are shown below. I always use a dataform for notices.

1) on an admin page where you want to place a button to add a new notice add the following new page button code:

[[include :snippets:newpage-button
|size=215px
|category=noticeboard
|name=notice
|parent=noticeboard
|button=Add a new noticeboard item
]]

2) in the site manager make the noticeboard category autonumbered.

3) add the following dataform syntax to the noticeboard:_template page:

[[form]]
fields:
  noticetext:
    label: Notice text
    type: text
    width: 100
    height: 5
  download:
    label: Open file
    type: file
  download2:
    label: Open file
    type: file
 download3:
    label: Open file
    type: file
 url:
    label: Related website link
    type: url
    default-schema: http://
[[/form]]

4) On the page where you the notices are to be displayed add the following ListPages module which calls the relevant fields from the dataform. The most recent 5 notices only are displayed:

[[module ListPages category="noticeboard" order="created_at desc" limit="5"]]

+++ %%title_linked%%

%%form_data{noticetext}%%

File: %%form_data{download}%%
File: %%form_data{download2}%% 
Related Website: %%form_data{url}%%
Go to %%linked_title%%
//Posted by RFPG on %%created_at|%e %B %Y%%//

[[div style="border-bottom:2px solid #223773;"]]
[[/div]]
[[/module]]

Hope that helps.

You need to use the offset parameter in the ListPage module. So if you are displaying the most recent 5 notices then to display older items than the most recent 5 your offset will be 5, that is it will not include the most recent 5 entries, as in the example below:

[[module ListPages category="noticeboard" perPage="10" order="created_at desc" offset="5" limit="6" separate="false" prependLine="||~ Date ||~ Title ||" appendLine="||||||~ ||"]]
|| %%date|%d/%m/%y%% || %%title_linked%% ||
[[/module]]

Yes of course, the styling on the steinberg site has just been done with CSS.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, I've had a busy 24 hours.

Whether you want the news on your start page or the in the side bar is really up to you, but I tend to think it is more visible on the start page itself.

To have a news box in a similar way to to the steinberg site could be done with a css module on your start page using the following syntax. You would need to adjust the positioning for your site. The result of this can be seen on the blog page:

[[module css]]

table.wiki-content-table {
    background-image: url("http://community.wikidot.com/local--files/files/bg_home.jpg");
    background-position: left top;
    background-repeat: repeat;
    border: 1px solid #888888;
    margin-right: 20px;

}

table.wiki-content-table th {
    border: none;
    text-align: left;
}

table.wiki-content-table td {
    border:  none; 
}

#extrac-div-1 {
    background-image: url("http://community.wikidot.com/local--files/files/rss.png");
    background-repeat: no-repeat;
    height: 35px;
    position: absolute;
    right: 55px;
    top: 205px;
    width: 35px;
}

[[/module]]

[[div style="height:25px;"]]
[[/div]]

[[module ListPages category="blog" limit="10" order="created_at desc" separate="false" prependLine="||~ News ||"]]
|| %%title_linked%%  ||
[[/module]]

1) If you only want the title to display:

[[module ListPages category="blog" limit="10" order="created_at desc" separate="false" prependLine="||~ News ||"]]
|| %%title_linked%%  ||
[[/module]]

2) You can't set the number of lines to display, but you can specify the number of characters:

[[module ListPages category="blog" limit="10" order="created_at desc" separate="false"]]
%%title_linked%%
%%preview(300)%%
[[/module]]

The possibilities are all listed in the ListPages module documentation.

1) On the frontpage I got also the text 'noticetext' displayed, how to remove it?

It's because you are using %%preview(200)%% (or whatever the number is you have used). You will need to use the %%form_data{noticetext}%% to remove that text. Unfortunately there isn't yet a way to merge these two commands and limit the %%form_data{noticetext}%% to a specific number of characters.

2) On the news page (http://www.openstudiopro.org/news) I see how the offset rule works, but how do I display the whole news message there (without links to the news item)?

Just use %%form_data{fieldname}%%, for example

[[module ListPages category="blog" limit="10" order="created_at desc" separate="false"]]
%%form_data{noticetext}%%
[[/module]]

You can tighten up the spacing of the news items by starting here and tweaking until it fits the look you're going for.

.list-pages-item h3{
    margin: 0 0 0 0;  /* top right bottom left */
}
.list-pages-item p {
    margin: 0 0 0 0;  /* top right bottom left */
}

.list-pages-item h3{
    margin: 0 0 2px 0; /* top right bottom left */
}
.list-pages-item p {
    margin: 0 0 0 0; /* top right bottom left */
}

-Ed

One other thing I noticed is that your H3 header text is smaller than the news item teaser text. That seems backwards to me. I think it would look better if the headline text was slightly larger than the teaser text in the paragraph below it (or the same size and bold).

-Ed

This is an simple example how it could be http://www.linuxdsp.co.uk/news/index.html

But in an earlier post you said you wanted it to to look like the news box at http://www.steinberg.net/en/home.html. I gave you the CSS to produce an almost identical result but as far as I can tell you didn't even try it. Wasting time like that gets me a bit cross. Please don't just find something on the internet that you think looks nice and then expect everyone else to produce a solution for you which you probably won't use.