News Carousels add visual interest

News Carousels draw a lot of attention by rotating through a series of News posts with images or videos. You can select the number of most recent posts to show in a carousel rotation, or curate a specific selection of posts for the carousel. Viewers can hover over the carousel to pause the rotation, and can navigate from post to post using the arrows or the circles that appear below the carousel. If a news post contains a video, users can view the video right from the carousel.

How to set up a News carousel

These instructions allow you to set up a News carousel that displays the most recently published items from its News sources.

1. Navigate to the page that you want to add a News Card to and click the Edit button (pencil icon) in the page header to go into edit mode.
2. Click Set up cards under the Content type & template heading on the right. The Update cards window will open.
3. In the Card setup window, find the News Carousel card. Click Set up below it (or the gear icon on the right of it). (If there is no News Carousel card in the Card setup window, see How to customize Cards on a page, or talk to your intranet administrator about making News Carousel cards available for you to use.)
4. By default, the Carousel type selected is Automatic, which will display the most recent news items from the sources that you select. If you would like to pick specific News items to show in the carousel (rather than most recent items), see the heading below about How to set up a curated News carousel.
   
   
   
   
5. To add a content source, start typing the name of a News or Blog page on your intranet in the Add content sources field. Click on the page that you want in the dropdown that appears. Repeat to add other content sources. Click the X on the right of a content source to remove it.
6. Enter the number of items that you want to display in the carousel in the Total # number of items in carousel field.
7. Click Update in the News Carousel setup window when you are finished.
8. Click Done at the bottom of the Update cards window.
9. Click Save at the top of the page or continue editing.

​You can choose to rotate the carousel continuously using a configuration setting. See Carousel settings to learn more.

How to set up a curated News carousel

You can curate the items that show in a News carousel, selecting individual news/blog posts and calendar events from different sources. You can also select the order they display in. This allows for a carousel to display hand-picked news items and events, rather than just the most recent news events added to its news sources.

If new News items or events are created in the source News/Calendar pages, it doesn't affect what shows in a curated News carousel. The carousel will continue to show the posts that have been specifically selected.

1. Navigate to the page that you want to add a News Card to and click the Edit button (pencil icon) in the page header to go into edit mode.
2. Click Set up cards under the Content type & template heading on the right. The Update cards window will open.
3. In the Update cards window, find the News Carousel Card. Click Set up below it (or the gear icon on the right of it).
4. Select the Curated radio button.
   
   
   
   
5. Click in the Add content field and start typing the name of a specific news/blog post or calendar event that you want to add to the carousel. (Note that repeating events cannot be added.)
6. Click on the title of the news/blog/event when you see it in the dropdown menu. This adds it to the list of carousel news items. Repeat steps 5 and 6 to add more news items.
7. Drag and drop the news items to arrange them in the order you want them to appear. Click X on the right of a news item to remove it from the list.
8. Click Update in the News Carousel setup window when you are finished.
9. Click Done at the bottom of the Update cards window.
10. Click Save at the top of the page or continue editing.

Image size for Carousel posts

Posts that will be shown in the carousel should include a Thumbnail image that is large, wide, and high quality, to look their best. The Thumbnail image for the post will be the background for the post in the carousel, with the title and summary of the post overlaid onto the image.

Because of the highly visual nature of News Carousels, it is important that News Carousel posts have appropriate Thumbnail images and cropping. To learn more, see How to add a Thumbnail image. For recommended image sizes for News Carousel posts, see News display options or Image size guidelines.

Video in carousels

Carousels are attention-grabbing visuals to have on intranet pages. The visual aspect can be enhanced with video that plays right within the carousel.

A play button is overlaid on the video thumbnail. This allows users to play the video directly from the carousel. To learn more, see Embed video and Add a video thumbnail image.

By default, carousel News items that have video on them will show the video as the carousel thumbnail instead of showing the page thumbnail. This allows users to play the video directly from the carousel. There is an option to be able to select whether a video will show as the carousel thumbnail or not. To learn more, see Carousel settings, or talk to your intranet administrator.