Membership Services: NewsUpdate

NewsUpdate Case Study: Emulation Zone
Note: this is only a possible solution, not necessarily their current solution

The Situation:

Emulation Zone places their news on a separate page, only placing the 5 most recent items on the main page. This page assumes you have already viewed the first case study.

The Proposal:

Use a 'wemu' FTP account for NewsUpdate with a directory structure like this:

/wemu/
   news.usr
   news.cfg
   news.dat
   web/
      wemunews.txt
      wemu/
         news.html
         archives

Here's the news.cfg: -- Config Title = Body = Tagline =<A href="http://" target="_blank"></A> KeepDays = 2 -- End -- Start news File = wemu/news.html ArchiveDir = wemu/archives -- Daybreak <TABLE border="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"> <TR><TD align="center" width="20%" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">  %date%</TD> <TD width="80%"></TD></TR> <TR><TD colspan="2" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><IMG src="clearpixel.gif" width="1" height="1"></TD></TR> </TABLE> -- Format <A NAME="%timestamp%"> %title% %body% %tagline% (%login%) -- End -- Start headlines File = wemunews.txt KeepItems = 5 -- Format <TR align=left valign=top><TD><LI> </TD> <TD> <A href="/wemu/index.htm#%timestamp%">%title%</A></TD></TR> -- End

Note that Category and Platform are not used, or even included. No reason to clutter the Add News page with stuff you don't need. Speaking of clutter, note that the 'headlines' format has TR tags, but no TABLE tags. The table is defined in the front page while wemunews.txt just fills in the rows.

The main news file uses the %timestamp% token (seconds since 1970) as an anchor tag so clicking on one of the headlines in 'wemunews.txt' will take them right to that item in the news file.

When KeepItems or KeepDays are defined in a template, they have no effect on archiving, just what is contained in that file.

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Last updated July 1, 1999 by Brian Rahn