One powerful way to make sure your members stay informed about your group's discussions is to post eGroup messages directly to your home page automatically. This allows your members to view the latest messages posted to your chapter/division eGroup without having to navigate to the eGroups page. This can be done using the Discussions User Control, which we will demonstrate how to activate in this tutorial. First, below are the two user controls you will need when you add the new content item. If you are familiar with user controls already, you can simply take the highlighted code below and paste them into the fields required to create a User Control Content Item. You can adjust the control parameters to fit your needs, as we have demonstrated with other user controls. User Control class or path: ws:Discussions User Control parameters: NumberToShow="4" HideIfNoData="False" ShowPicture="False" ShowIfNotLoggedIn="True" ShowEgroupName="False" ShowContributor="True" ShowPostDateTime="True" ShowContent="True" ShowAllDiscussions="False" IgnoreStaff="False" IncludeEligiblePosts="False" ContentLength="150" SubjectLength="50" NotLoggedInNoDataText="<a href='https://iaap-hq.org/eSeries/source/security/member-logon.cfm?section=unknown&activesection=home'>Sign in</a> to view discussions. New to eGroups? Check out this <a href='http://sitebuilders.iaap-hq.org/user-help/egroups' target='_blank'>guide</a>." NoDataText="There are no discussions at this time" Adding eGroup discussions to a chapter/division home page In this example we will be adding a new content item to the home page to display recent eGroup discussions. Because we want this new content item to be displayed below the Announcements content item, we have highlighted the Announcements items prior to clicking "New." This ensures that the new content item will be placed below Announcements.  Creating the new content item will bring up the regular Enter/Edit Content screen. You can type in the title you'd like to use ("Recent Discussions" in this example) and you can choose which section you'd like the content item to appear (if applicable; if you are using a one-column layout this option will not be displayed). Because we want this content item to be displayed in our right column, we have selected section 2. Below you can see where we pasted our user control information into each field. Notice to get these fields to display, we changed the "Type of content" from the default HTML to User Control. Also note that we have selected the "Send Title?" box and UNchecked the "Show?" option from the main title. What this will do is wrap the content item in a container with a blue heading (the same that you see on the IAAP Web Community home page). If you do not wish to display your content this way, You can simply reverse those checkboxes so that "Show?" is checked and "Send Title?" is not. This will give you a plain heading for the content item with no container, which for some older sites will match the site better.  You can modify exactly how the messages appear by editing the True/False parameters within each control. For example, by default the ShowPicture control is set to "False." However, you could change it to "True" and each message would also display the contributor's profile photo (if one is available). You can also adjust the number of messages to show on the home page by changing the "NumberToShow" control (set at 4 by default). Once you have saved your new content item, you should see it on your home page. Notice for this example below, there is no data displayed. That is because no messages have been posted to this eGroup yet.  After adding a new message to this chapter's eGroup, you can see that how it displays by default.  |
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Advanced > User Controls >
eGroup Messages |