How to add Community News Section to WordPress and Blogger Blogs

Community news is the way to share news/posts from other websites with your readers. community news section let your readers submit news or posts to your blog using a form and the posts will be displayed in your blog’s sidebar after your moderation. In this tutorial I’m going to explain a method that you can use to allow your readers to submit news or posts to your WordPress or blogspot blog.

Add Community News Panel to WordPress Blog

It is really easy to add community news panel to WordPress blog. All you need to install FV Community News WordPress plugin.

Step 1. First install FV Community News WordPress plugin from your WordPress dashboard and activate it.

Step 2. Now you can see a new tab with the name of Submissions in the bottom left side of your WordPress dashboard.

Step 3. The Submissions tab further has three columns:
Submissions: Here you can find the posts submitted by the users.
Settings: You can change the settings of this plugin from here according to your requirement.
Uninstall: In case you don’t want to use this plugin any more, you can uninstall this plugin from here.

Step 4. To add the Community News form and Community News panel to your theme, go to Appearance -> Widgets. Now select the two widgets: ‘Community News Submissions’ and ‘Community News Form’ and drag to the sidebar where you want these widgets to display.

Step 5. You can also show your Community News form and Community News Submissions to a static page. You can do that by placing the following code on a static page:

Add From

<?php if (function_exists('fvCommunityNewsForm'))

    fvCommunityNewsForm(); ?>

Or

<!--fvCommunityNews:Form-->

Latest Submissions

<?php if (function_exists('fvCommunityNewsGetSubmissions'))
echo fvCommunityNewsGetSubmissions(Number, Template); ?>

* Number – Insert number of items you would like to show here

* Template – Structure per item. You can use the following tags:

• %submission_author%
• %submission_author_email%
• %submission_title%
• %submission_url%
• %submission_description%
• %submission_date%
• %submission_image%

By default the Template is :

<li><h3><a href="%submission_url%" title="%submission_title%">%submission_title%</a></h3><p>%submission_description%</p><small>%submission_date%</small></li>

Or

<!--fvCommunityNews:Submissions-->

Add Community News Panel To Blogger/Blogspot Blogs

Blogger/Blogspot blogs do not have any plugin or widget to show Community News Panel like WordPress blogs. So we need to do all the work manually for blogger blogs.

• First you need to create a submission form so that users can submit news to your blog. To create a form go to Google Docs and create a form for you.
• Now embed this form to your blogger template. Create a new page on your blog and paste the code of the form here. Now publish the page. You can also show this form on your sidebar.
• Now whenever a user submit the news on your blog, you will get it in Google Docs and you have to manually insert it in your blog.
• Go to your blogger Dashboard -> Layout -> Page Elements and click on Add a Gadget. Select Link List from the pop up window.
• Add all the submitted posts/news in the Link list window and it will be displayed in your sidebar.
• That’s all to add Community News Panel to blogger blog.

If you have any queried related to this tutorial don’t hesitate to leave a comment here.