Creating News Items
The AnVIL portal lists news items:
- In the news section available from the top nav,
- Optionally in the featured news section on the home page,
- In site search results,
- and also in external search results and when a news item is shared on social media.
URLs
News items are namespaced by their publication date and have URLs like:
https://anvilproject.org/news/2020/06/19/announcing-gen3-availability-in-anvil
Markdown Files
News items are implemented with markdown .md files that are under the /content/news folder in the AnVIL portal repository.
The URL namespace above is accomplished by creating news item markdown files in subdirectories named for year, month and day
of the publication date given us a directory structure like:
── news
│ ├── 2019
│ │ └── 12
│ │ └── 05
│ │ └── dockstore-training.md
│ ├── 2020
│ │ ├── 05
│ │ │ └── 21
│ │ │ └── discover-anvil-at-bcc-2020.md
│ │ ├── 06
│ │ │ └── 19
│ │ │ ├── _images
│ │ │ │ ├── gen3-noshadow.png
│ │ │ │ └── gen3.png
│ │ │ └── announcing-gen3-availability-in-anvil.md
│ │ └── 11
│ │ └── 20
│ │ └── nhgri-anvil-now-supports-free-export-of-gtex-data.md
Front Matter
The front matter information controls how the event displays in lists, if it appears on the home page, and how the event appears when sharing on social media. Front matter fields for events are:
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
| title: | NHGRI AnVIL Cloud Platform Now Supports Free Export of GTEx Data |
| description: | A short description for the event lists and social media shares e.g. "An introduction to the AnVIL platform to enable CCDG and CMG researchers to analyze GSP data using AnVIL tools." |
| featured: | true if the event should appear on the home page events list. |
| date: | Date used for ordering the event lists e.g. "2020-10-20" |
| description: | Text used in the event lists and social media shares e.g. "In support of the evolving nature of the NHGRI mission, we are pleased to announce that researchers are now able to download controlled access GTEx V8 to local compute infrastructure without incurring egress fees." |
Body Text
Some very general guidelines for writing news articles:
- Audience: Media or Anvil Community? - News items can be more formally written to address the media or targeted news to the AnVIL community.
- Third Person Voice - "Today the AnVIL development team released..."
- Headline - Brief and to the point.
- Lead paragraph - summarizing the announcement.
- Two or Three body paragraphs - with links, or quotes providing additional information.
- Platform/Component Descriptions - very brief overview paragraphs for the AnVIL project or any involved components or tools.
- Break up long paragraphs - two or three sentences at most for the web.
- Contact information - If appropriate.
- Image or Diagram - If possible.
Review existing news items in the news section for inspiration.