ShortPoint Connect makes gathering and presenting news posts and news links from sites and subsites associated with a hub site effortless. In this article, we will show you how you can use the Hub News connection type with any ShortPoint Design element to display news on your SharePoint intranet page.

Note: If you want to present news posts and news links from your current site collection or a specific site collection, please check out the article on Site News connection type. And if you want to present news posts and links from across all site collections within a Microsoft SharePoint tenancy, please view the article on Org News connection type.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Prerequisites:
• Step 1: Select a ShortPoint Design Element
• Step 2: Press Hub News connection
• Step 3: Fill in the Connect fields
• Step 4: Map Items
• Step 5: Insert or Update Design Element and Save

Prerequisites:

• You need to have ShortPoint installed or upgraded to ShortPoint SPFx version 7.3.x.xx or later on Microsoft Office 365 (SharePoint Online) or SharePoint 2019 environment.
• You need to be a ShortPoint User with an active license.
• You also need to have at least Read permissions to connect to your organization’s site collections. For more information, check our FAQ article: What permissions are required to be able to view news posts and links that are dynamically inserted using any of the ShortPoint News connection types?

Step 1: Select a ShortPoint Design Element

First, launch edit mode on a ShortPoint web part on your SharePoint site page. Then, you can choose to add a new ShortPoint Design Element by pressing the insert icon to open Page Builder options. You can also opt to edit an existing Design element by clicking the cogwheel settings icon.

In this example, we are going to create a news section on the page using Image Titles:

Step 2: Press Hub News connection

Switch to the Connect tab when the Design Element settings window opens. Hit the Hub News tile from the connection type options.

Step 3: Fill in the Connect fields

To enable Hub News connection, you will need to complete a few required fields.

Note: Connecting with Hub News connection will use SharePoint Search and bring all news pages from the selected hub site. News results may not always be updated as it is subject to SharePoint Search crawl.

Select a hub

Identify the specific Hub site you wish to pull news articles from. The dropdown will automatically populate with a list of hub sites from your SharePoint tenancy.

Item Limit

Indicate the number of news items you want to display on your page or leave it at 0 to show all items that were pulled.

Select column to sort

Sort content gathered from your news source by Title, Date Created, Last Modified, and Author, and select sorting in ascending or descending order.

Default Image

In instances when the news pages you pull do not have image URLs attached to them, you can designate an image to be used. Insert a URL or select an image from your SharePoint library.

Date/Time Format

Customize how the date and time of your news posts or links will be displayed by entering your preferred format tokens. We have a support article you can refer to on How to Use Custom Date and Time Formats with ShortPoint Design Elements.

Use Cases

Choose from several Use Cases available for Hub News connection to automatically filter news content. This functionality features the most common configurations ShortPoint users are looking to produce.

For more information about Use Cases, you can check out our support article on Getting Started with Use Cases.

Some Use Cases may require additional Use Case Parameters such as the Latest Date field in our example below. Default values will appear for the Use Case and the parameters will automatically be applied. You can modify this and enter your preferred parameters. Hit the Parameters Not Applied button to apply them.

Note: You can use Placeholders as your Use Case Parameters. Check out our support article on How To Use Placeholders In Connections.

Once all required fields are complete, press the Connect button to establish the connection with your news source.

Step 4: Map Items

You can now identify what items to display on your SharePoint page. Go to the Items tab, hit the chain icon on each item field, and select the content you want to appear.

Note: You can check out our ShortPoint Connect: Basic Tutorial article to learn more about items mapping.

In this example, we mapped the Image field to the medium Image URL. This is a new feature where you can choose the size for images. We also entered the values for the Title, Description, Link, and Link options fields.

Step 5: Insert or Update Design Element and Save

At this point, you can hit Preview to check how your Design Element will present your news content. When you no longer need to make further adjustments, you can hit Insert or Update and Save your changes.

That is all! Your hub site news now rollup into your intranet page.

Related articles:

• Connection Type: Site News
• Connection Type: Organization News
• Getting Started with Use Cases
• How To Use Placeholders In ShortPoint Connections
• ShortPoint Connect: Basic Tutorial
• What permissions are required to be able to view news posts and links that are dynamically inserted using any of the ShortPoint News connection types?