The Staffbase platform allows audience-specific publishing of dynamic content. In order to enable this, we use three powerful elements: news pages, channels, and posts.

News Page

A news page is like a newspaper or a social network, where new content is regularly published. The latest posts are always displayed at the top, which is why older posts gradually disappear from the newsfeed and the user’s radar. This means that the content has a short to medium lifespan.

You can create as many news pages as you would like. Each news page allows you to control access to the channels and the posts within it. Users see news pages as menu items on the app. Administrators or Managing Editors can sort the positioning of a news page in the menu and can thus decide on, where the users find information in the app.

A news page can contain any number of channels and a channel, in turn, can have any number of posts. With the help of channels and news pages, you can target content for specific target groups or topics. For example, you can have channels dedicated to news from sales or news for the location in Spain under a news page.

To set up a news page, take a look at the article Creating a News Page.

Channel

The core of social interactions on the Staffbase platform happens in channels and posts. A channel is like a news segment in your newspaper or, in this case, the news page. For example, in a newspaper, the sports segment carries only news related to sports. Similarly, a channel can have numerous posts, but it is designed to carry only posts that are of the same type. The contributions in channels are dynamic and contain mostly information with a short to medium-lived character. Read Content Lifespan in the Platform to learn more about the types of content supported by the Staffbase Platform based on their longevity.

You can create as many channels as you like. You need to assign each channel to a news page so that posts, such as media, updates, and articles appear to the specific target audience in the app. You can even assign channels to several news pages, which can be useful in large companies with spaces and different groups. Depending on the visibility settings, users see either only the parent news page in the menu of the app or each channel contained in the news page as a sub-item in the menu.

Of the three elements that you need for news broadcasting to your app, the channel is the element that helps to create exactly the right platform for your content use cases. Channels allow very fine, granular visibility settings as to who is allowed to see the posts within a specific channel in the app. You can also configure the authorized editors in the channel settings. Both of these settings make it possible to configure very different use cases, for example:

• “News from the CEO”
  The channel is visible to everyone. But only a small group of editors can publish news here.
• “Team News”
  The channel is visible to one team only. But the whole team can publish news here.

The channel also defines the form in which the posts in the channel are displayed. There are three different channel types to support different use cases:

• Article: Texts, images, and other media.
• Media: A picture or video with a short caption. 
• Updates: A short text with an option for media. 

To create and customize the channel settings, take a look at News Quickstart Guide.

Post

A post is like a news item in a newspaper. To further break it down, in a newspaper, the news items can be grouped according to the news segments they belong to. For example, international news segment in a newspaper will carry news items from around the world. Similarly, in this case, the posts are dependent on the channel they belong to. Channels contain dynamic content that is broadcasted to the employee app.

Post are shown as newsfeeds in the app, which is a listing of all the latest posts. There is a general newsfeed on the startpage of the app. And each newspage and channel can be selected to show only the newsfeed of that newspage or channel.

A post is created within a channel. The post takes the form of the type of channel it belongs to. For example, if you create an article channel, the posts created within this channel type will all be articles.

As newer posts are published, older posts move to the bottom of the newsfeed and gradually disappear from the newsfeed. Although the older posts disappear from the newsfeed, they can be located through searches.

To create a post, take a look at the article Creating a Post.