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I asked this question in the "All Category" thread, but it was never answered so I'm trying again.

It appears to me that the newsletter comes up displaying the "All" category, when a user first logs in. The "All" category is simply a blog--a list of all postings published to the site, listed in chronological order (last to the first). That is fine if we are using the application as a blog, but I feel that it will be confusing if we are trying to provide a Newsletter.

For a Newsletter, I would like to control what the user first sees when he/she logs in. I would like the Bishopric Message or Stake Presidency Message to come up first. Then the user can chose categories to read articles from the other organizations that are of interest to the user. Are there plans to add a way to control what category is viewed when the user first logs in?

Thanks.

The question of having a featured article that is at the top of the All category is discussed in the tread Pinning an article so that it shows at the top. I think it would be a great addition to the Newsletter feature.

There was a recent update from Mindie Sorenson with this vague but tantalizing item:

SorensonMi wrote:Future releases will address these issues:
...
- enhance and clarify featured article functionality

As for the question of whether this is a newsletter or a blog, I guess different people will have different perspectives. Although this feature is called "Newsletter," it sure looks like a blog to me. It acts in so many ways like a blog (chronological posts, categories, even the general layout), and I'm hard pressed to see how it can be described as a newsletter.

Thanks for your response. In light of the fact that it is called a "Newsletter" and that Mindie states that "the intent of the Newsletter application is to eventually replace the printed newsletter", I was just offering a tweak that might help it to more closely function in that way (IE: a tighter organizational structure).

One feature that I use to keep my "welcome to the newsletter" at the head of the list is to click on the pencil edit link, scroll down and click "save" and the article is now at the top of the list. With a little creativity, it is possible to do some arranging of the articles.

zaneclark wrote:One feature that I use to keep my "welcome to the newsletter" at the head of the list is to click on the pencil edit link, scroll down and click "save" and the article is now at the top of the list. With a little creativity, it is possible to do some arranging of the articles.

That's a clever idea, but it won't work for long. In this post, Mindie Sorenson says:

Future releases will address these issues:
- Don't use edit date to determine sequence of articles

I reported this issue in the thread Ordering of articles based on edit date, not creation date, and apparently it has been acknowledged as a bug that will be fixed. When it is fixed, the creation date (not the last modified date) will determine the order, and the trick of modifying an article to move it to the top of the list will no longer work.