News & Information section - categorization & attachments

[ericb]

I would like to start encouraging our ward organizations to post relevant information to the News & Information section of the ward web site. This is in an effort to help minimize/eliminate other non-official sites being used for church purposes. In looking to do this, I've ran into the following issues:

1) Because there doesn't appear to be a way to 'categorize' information, I'm afraid of the section ending up as a smattering of different posts, discouraging people from wanting to use it. It would really be helpful when submitting a post if the user could select one or more organizations (or 'other') as the category. You could go with a fixed set of categories, or better yet let the ward web admin define them. The categories could be extended for use with calendar events.

2) Also, I'm very happy to see there is an attachment option for the posts (i'm a fairly new clerk, so forgive me if this has been around for awhile). The one issue we've ran into is the 1MB file size limit. We will be wanting to post our ward's family preparedness guide, which is 5MB. I'm wondering if perhaps the quota could be assigned at the ward level rather than at a file level -- the ward would then be responsible to manage the use of space. If a ward legitimately had a reason for a higher quota, they would need to contact the web admins and explain the special need.

[bhofmann]

I would like to see some enhancements to the News & Information section as well. Over the years we have tried it for things like announcements, newsletters, etc. and it hasn't fit any of our situations perfectly yet. We usually abandon using it. I think it is a great tool but may need to be enhanced a little.

[lincles-p40]

categories would be great - something more like a CMS like joomla or other popular ones. Also it would be great to have a RSS feed that members could subscribe to - maybe even a feed for each category and a combined feed. I know that i am more likely to read news in my RSS agrigator than going to a site to read it.

[JasonG-p40]

The restrictions on how versitile and organized you can really make the ward websites is one of the main reasons why I rarely (< 5%) use the ward sites for anything other than the calendar to be honest.

There is some definite potential there once we get some enhancements going, though.