How to create a basic news site

Hi all

I have been playing around with modx and the thing is I have a very limited time to learn it and time is running out for me. I have been looking at the documentation but its been a little confusing and difficult to learn as compared to something like wordpress. Maybe I’m in too much of a hurry.

Anyway, what I really want is to create a basic news site. I mean it has static pages, and one news section and one events section. I installed modx along with addons like NewsPublisher and Ditto. However, when I go to the user interface, I dont really see any links to the news publishing section. I can only create pages. So I really need help with this quickly.

It would really help if there are any links to step by step instructions on how to do this and how to set up a theme or template which displays a static welcom text and then a latest news or events block.

Please HELP!!!

Thanks

The news publishing section is only documents in a certain part of the Document Tree structure. Create a new document, name it News. It will be the parent/container of your News section, as well as displaying your list of news article summaries with links to the individual news pages. Documents can be both web pages and parent/containers for other documents.

Now, right-click on that new News document, and choose "Create Document here". Make your first news document. The easiest way to deal with the news section from now on is to simply "Duplicate" this document for all the other news documents you want, then edit them. (note that I differentiate between the News document and news documents. The News document is the parent, the one that will show up on the site’s menu).

You’ll have your Ditto snippet tags in the News document. You can have other Ditto calls on other pages, for example to have a few news items on your home page. The Ditto snippet is told with parameters (like the query string on a URL) where to go get its news items from, how many to display, and what chunk to use as a view template for each item. See the ditto.modxcms.com site for full details on how to use Ditto.

Thanks Susan

I did that but what happens is that it just creates sub pages under the News page. And it also shows up on the menu like..

-News
- Site opens
- New Site Layout
- etc

I only want the News to be seen on the menu, and when I go to the News page, I want each news item to be displayed with the title and a summary, kind of like a blog.

Thanks again

Edit those news documents and clear the "Show in menu" checkbox. Now, in your main News document, put a Ditto snippet call:

Do a little looking into the Ditto documentation for how to configure Ditto to behave exactly as you like. You’ll probably mostly be interested in the parameters to begin with.