Creating the News Bar
What the Wizard allows you to do is to enter what you want to be in your News Bar, and it gives you a bit of code that you can copy and paste into your Drupal site.
Don’t worry if you don’t know HTML. Just think of the code as if it were stage directions, from a very particular director. In some cases, if the stage directions aren’t followed exactly, or any are missing, then the play will come to a halt. So in terms of code, when you’re copying, just be careful to select the right bit, and then copy and paste it like any other bit of text.
To begin, visit http://tinyurl.com/newsbar or www.google.com/uds/solutions/wizards/newsbar.html. In the first section, you’ll see that you can create a horizontal or vertical News Bar by clicking in either radio button (see Figure 8.2).
The Search Expression field is what the Wizard uses to create news items. (If you look below, you’ll see a sample News Bar—what it looks like, based on the search terms—in this example, starting with eWeek). And the Title field is the title that appears. You can put a title there or a space. Then you click Show Code when done.
If you’d like to follow the example, type in a series of phrases in the Search Expression field, such as “digital storytelling, self publishing, life stories,” and enter “News” in the Title field (see Figure 8.3). Then you can have a horizontal or vertical orientation, but for this example, I recommend a vertical orientation, so click the News Strip (vertical orientation) radio button.
Figure 8.3. Entering in Search Expressions to determine what kind of news you’d like.
Then click the Show Code button. A new section will appear below, with code that you can copy and paste into Drupal. In order to copy it over, just click to the left of the very top line (such as, <!- -), and begin to drag down to select it (see Figure 8.4).
And drag to the right until you reach the end (see Figure 8.5).
Then copy it into memory: Edit > Copy, or click Ctrl+C, or right-click (Windows) and copy, or Ctrl+click (Mac) and copy (see Figure 8.6).
When you go into Drupal, if it doesn’t paste, you might need to go back and select it again. So I recommend either opening up a new tab for your Drupal site or a new window. If you haven’t tried Firefox, you might want to use it. The tabs work nicely (www.firefox.com).