One of our clients asked for a standard Press Release section for their Magento site. With the majority of their website built on the Magento platform, it made more sense to build an extension to handle the press releases, rather than add a whole separate CMS. The rationale was that having a single CMS to log into will increase productivity and eliminate confusion. Since Magento has a decent CMS and user role/permission interface, it just made sense to do a little Magento development and enhance the CMS functionality.
Extending Magento
We worked through some details and nailed down the functionality, enabling complete control of press releases within the Magento framework. With this functionality fully integrated, the administrator finally had complete control of all the functions they wanted within their site, all accessed with one login in one place.
User Story
The administrator that desires to add a new Press Release via Magento will login and click on a new menu item under the CMS menu. After clicking on a "Add new item" the input screen will allow the administrator to select a type (is it a News Article or a Press Release?) and fill in the following fields: title, author, summary/excerpt, actual content, author biography, date to start displaying the item (the date to start displaying the item as a current item), expiration date (the date to change this item to an archived item), and status (enabled or disabled?).
The public site will display a slick menu that will allow the user to choose between News Articles and Press Releases. Within the News Articles and Press Releases, the user has the option of selecting current articles or archived/expired articles.
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We contributed it to the community on Magento Connect. At the time of writing, the extension is no longer available.
If you would like a custom Magento extension created, please contact us. If you would like to learn more about our work with Magento, please visit our Magento page.
