News and updates

You’ll need: Updates — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

Updates are your dated posts: announcements, articles, notices, podcast episodes. They appear newest-first on your public news page, each with its own address you can send to somebody.

The fields that matter

Headline and body are the post. Publication date decides where it sits in the list — and note that it is a field you control, not a timestamp of when you typed it, so a post written on Friday can carry Monday’s date.

Photos illustrate it. Category groups posts so visitors can filter. Author links the post to a member of your team, which is what makes a byline possible. Documents attach files.

Type is worth knowing about: an update can be an article, or a podcast episode with a YouTube, Spotify or Apple link and an episode number and duration. If you publish audio, you do not need a separate module for it.

Featured posts

is featured, with a featured from and featured to window, promotes a post — typically onto your front page — for a period and then stops.

The dates are the useful half. Set the window when you create the post and the promotion expires on its own. Without them, “featured” means “until somebody remembers to unfeature it”, and stale featured content is a reliable sign of a site nobody is minding.

Members-only posts

An update carries access membership types. Leave it empty and the post is public. Put one or more tiers in it and only members holding one of those tiers can read the body; everyone else sees the post exists and is invited to join.

   access_membership_types EMPTY   ->  public, anyone reads it
   access_membership_types SET     ->  headline visible, body locked

That last part is the design worth understanding: gated posts are not hidden. Being able to see that there is something worth joining for is the whole mechanism. Hiding them entirely would advertise nothing.

Note it is the active tier that counts. An expired member gets the same locked view as a stranger, plus a prompt to renew.

Write the headline for the list

Most people meet your post as one line in a list of posts. “An important announcement” gives a reader no reason to click. “Depot closed 14-16 August for Eid” tells them what they need without clicking at all — which is a success, not a failure.

Try it