Linchpin Enterprise News for Confluence: New design options, readable news feed macros and upcoming magazine feature

Our Hyperfly development team has added a number of improvements and features to the Linchpin Enterprise News app for Confluence. And, they've released a video of the recent review where they announced these useful additions!

Design variations for Linchpin Enterprise News

The new Full image design option gives your news articles in the Cover Stories macro and the News hub in Linchpin an attractive makeover. Administrators can switch the design option in the Linchpin Enterprise News configuration: Go to your Confluence administration area, scroll down to Linchpin Enterprise News, select Design options, and then choose the design you'd like to use.

In the new design, your images will take up the entire tile, with minimal text information overlaid on each tile. The classic design displays the text under a smaller version of the teaser image.  When you hover of the tile in the full image design, the image will be dimmed and more information about the news article will pop up.

Linchpin Enterprise News - full image design

When you use the Linchpin Theme app with Linchpin Enterprise News, you can customize both the new full image design and the classic design. Use the customization settings in the Linchpin Theme administration under Advanced styling options for Linchpin apps to change the colors of the backgrounds, text, titles and more. It's easy to make this new design fit with your corporate image and make sure it is easily readable.

News feed macro lets you read older news articles easily

To avoid information overwhelm, it's always best to limit the amount of news displayed on a page. But sometimes, you may want to read older news articles. The News feed macro in Linchpin Enterprise News now lets you keep reading easily - click on the Show older news at the bottom of the macro. This automatically expands the list of new items, working in the same way as many popular blog and social platforms.

Linchpin Enterprise News - Show older news in the News feed macro

Alternatively, you can choose to use up and down arrows in the News feed macro configuration to scroll through the news articles, page by page. You may find this nicer to read instead of displaying more and more news articles in an ever-increasing list. The container will maintain its size and not change the layout of the page. Users can click on the Back to top link to scroll back up to the most recent articles.

To switch to using these arrows, open the News feed macro configuration, and select the Scrolling via arrows radio button and save your configuration and page. When you reload the page, you'll have attractive arrows at the bottom of the News feed, which you can click on to read more news articles.

Linchpin Enterprise News - News feed macro navigation/display options

News magazine - an upcoming feature of Linchpin Enterprise News

Magazines in Linchpin Enterprise News combine news articles with other content to provide an information-rich experience for your readers. They will let you create 'snapshots' of your most important news articles and supplementary information. In the current development iteration, this includes text, lists, and YouTube videos. In the next iteration, we'll include news modules.

You will be able to choose between a variety of layout options for the modules or rows of your magazine by simply editing the module.

Linchpin Enterprise News - editing magazine modules is easy

Linchpin Enterprise News - Adding modules to a magazine

Magazines provide you with the flexibility to target different audiences - a roundup of health and safety announcements and news from the OHS group, highlights from past events and announcements of new events from your event managers, reports and developments from upper management, ... Magazines will be easily available to your employees via the News hub.

Linchpin Enterprise News - Magazines will be available via the News hub

We are sure that your corporate communications teams will love the upcoming Linchpin Enterprise News magazines feature as well as the improvements available now in the most recent version of the Linchpin Enterprise News app for Confluence, available on the Atlassian Marketplace.

Would you like to learn more about Linchpin, our sophisticated solution that turns Confluence into a fully-fledged social intranet with highly customizable options for corporate communications? We'd be happy to chat with you about your needs and use cases and invite you to take a demonstration. You can find more detailed information about its features, advantages, and prices on the Linchpin website. Take a look at all of the features in a pre-configured system - our public demonstration instance is available at any time and a great way to get a first impression.

Further information

Everything you need to know about the Linchpin Enterprise News app for Confluence
Social intranets with Linchpin: News module for Onboarding and Assistant
Linchpin News Digest – Deliver intranet news via email
Linchpin Intranet Suite 1.1: Many new features and options for Confluence-based intranets