News

The News page is where you write, publish and manage news posts for your organisation — announcements, results, club updates and anything else you want to share on your public site.

You'll find it in the admin sidebar under Publish updates → News.

Who can use this

Club admins and moderators can open the News page. Admins can do everything automatically. Moderators can browse the list too, but to save or publish a post a moderator needs the news.publish permission (this is granted to moderators by default, but an admin can change it). Without it, saving is blocked.

News needs the News feature to be switched on for your organisation. If you can't see it in the sidebar, ask an admin to enable it on the Features page.

What's on the page

The main News page lists every post you've written, newest first, in a searchable table. Each row shows the post's title and web address, its Status, its Audience, and the published and last-updated dates. There's a New post button in the top right, and you can search, filter by status, and re-sort the list. A post marked From your WordPress site was sent by your connected WordPress site (see below). Above the table, Categories and tags opens a panel where you rename, merge and delete them.

Step by step

Write a new post

Write a news post asks three short questions.

1. Click New post (top right of the News page).
2. What's the headline? — the Title, the Web address (which fills itself in from the title and warns you if it's already taken), and a one-line summary shown in listings and social shares.
3. What do you want to say? — the same rich-text editor you use for page bodies.
4. Who should see it, and when? — tick Publish it straight away to go live now, or leave it off for a draft. Then choose which organisations list it (see the field reference below).
5. Click Save post.

Edit, preview and publish a post

1. Click a row (or the pencil Edit icon) on the News page.
2. Make your changes. The edit screen asks the same questions as writing a new post, plus How it appears in Google and Who can see it, and when?.
3. Click Preview (top right) to see exactly how the post will look on your live site, complete with your site header and footer.
4. Tick or untick Published to control whether the post is live, and set a Published date if you want to control its visible date and order.
5. Click Save post.

While a post is still a draft, a Publish post button sits beside Save post — it saves everything you've changed and puts the post live in one go, so you don't have to find the Published tick box first. It disappears once the post is live, and Save post then updates the live copy.

Schedule a post

The Publishing schedule panel above the post form keeps a post hidden until a time you choose.

1. Save the post as a draft.
2. In Publishing schedule, pick a Publish at date and time, in your organisation's time zone.
3. Optionally pick a Take down at time as well.
4. Click Save schedule.

The post goes live within five minutes of that time and is dated at the time you picked. At the take-down time it goes back to Draft. Saving the post as a draft keeps the schedule. Ticking Published or pressing Publish post puts it live straight away and cancels the pending publish time. Cancel schedule clears both times. To schedule a post you need the news.publish permission, the same as publishing it.

Add a category and tags

1. Open the post (or start a new one).
2. Under Category and tags, pick a Category, or choose New category… and type one.
3. In Tags, type a tag and press Enter (or a comma). Pick from the suggestions to reuse one you already have. Up to 10 tags.
4. Click Save post. New categories and tags are created when you save.

On your site the post shows its category and tags as links, and each one opens your news list showing only matching posts.

Rename, merge or delete categories and tags

1. On the News page, open Categories and tags above the table.
2. Each one shows how many posts and events use it. Use Rename, Merge (moves everything into another category or tag, then removes this one) or Delete (removes it from every post and event; the posts themselves stay).

News and events share the same categories and tags, so you'll see the same list on the Events page.

Bring back an earlier version of a post

Every save keeps a revision of the post: its title, summary, body, images and search settings. That includes changes made by the Helix Assistant or by search and replace.

1. Open the post and click Revision history under its title.
2. Each row shows who saved it and when. To see what changed, pick From on one row and To on another, then click Compare selected. Pick Now on the top row to compare a revision with the post as it is.
3. Click Restore on the revision you want. If the post is published, the restored words are live straight away. The screen asks you to confirm before it saves.

A restore is saved as a new revision on top, so nothing in the list is lost. It doesn't change the post's status, web address, author, category or tags. The last 50 revisions are kept.

Translate a post into your other site languages (Pro)

If your site runs in more than one language (Pro plan, added under Other site languages in Business details), the Translations panel lists your other site languages and whether each one has a translation: Not translated, Draft or Published.

1. Select Add a translation beside a language. The translation editor opens with the title, summary, body and search fields for that language. The body starts as a copy of the original, so you can translate it in place. Dates, images, the category and the web address always come from the original.
2. To start from a machine draft, select Draft with Helix. Helix translates the original and saves it as a draft marked Drafted by Helix. It uses one Helix prompt from your daily allowance for every 5,000 characters or so.
3. Read it through and fix anything that reads wrongly, then select Publish. Readers who use that language now see your translation. Everyone else still sees the original.

If you edit the original later, the translation shows Original changed until you check it and save it again. It stays live in the meantime. To take a translation down, open it and select Unpublish.

Unpublish a post

Open the post, untick Published, then Save post. The post returns to Draft and disappears from your public news pages — you can republish it any time by ticking Published again.

View the live post

For published posts, use the View public page icon on the row (it opens the post on your site in a new tab).

Posts from your WordPress site

If your club writes news in WordPress, the ClubHelix plugin can send each post here when you publish it, so it can go in broadcasts and on your ClubHelix news list. Switch on Send published posts to ClubHelix in the plugin's Sync tab (see WordPress).

• Only the title, excerpt, featured image and link come across. The post itself stays in WordPress, and its card on your news list opens it there.
• These posts are read-only here. Open one to find Edit in WordPress and Unpublish. Changes you make in WordPress, including taking the post down, follow automatically.
• When you switch it on, your 200 most recent published posts are sent too, in the background over the next 20 minutes or so. Older posts aren't sent.
• Deleting a post in WordPress takes it down here as well, even if you delete it permanently or empty the trash.

Field reference

Tips & FAQ

• Let Helix write the first draft. Select Draft with Helix above the body, add a few notes and select Draft. Insert fills the title, summary and body for you to check and save. Headline ideas under the title suggests five headlines, and Suggest search text writes the Google title and description. Nothing is saved until you save. See AI Studio.
• Draft first, publish later. Save without ticking publish to keep working privately. Preview is available once a post has been saved.
• Schedule or Published date? The Published date field only changes the date a post shows and where it sits in the listing. It doesn't hide the post until then. To keep a post hidden until a set time, use the Publishing schedule panel.
• Saving is disabled. If you see a warning that admin write features are locked, your Subscription & billing is overdue — sort that out and saving returns.
• Categories or tags? Use a category for the main sections of your news (Juniors, Seniors, Match reports) and tags for anything else worth grouping (a team, a season, an event). A post has one category and up to 10 tags.
• Why doesn't a filtered list show in Google? A list filtered by category or tag tells search engines not to index it, and points them at your full news list instead. It is the same posts re-sliced. The posts themselves are still indexed as normal.
• Shared posts from a parent body carry that body's categories, not yours, so they don't appear when your news list is filtered.
• Why can't I edit a post from WordPress? Its words and picture live in WordPress, so you change them there and the update follows. Here you can only unpublish it.
• Renaming the slug changes the post's web address, so any old links to it will stop working.
• On the Pro plan, the Helix Assistant can draft posts for you. Open the assistant from the News page and describe the post (for example, "draft a post welcoming new members for the season"). Drafts are never published automatically — you review and publish.
• Related publishing tools: Newsletters, Match reports, Events and Broadcasts.
• Translations are a Pro feature. On another plan the Translations panel shows an upgrade note instead. If you move off Pro, your translations are kept, but visitors see only your main language until you upgrade again.