How News Works
The Cortex news page.
The Cortex home page contains news items collected from the Cortex update server. These news posts are usually written by the Cortex development staff. Administrators can add their own posts to the home pages of their Cortex servers via the News Administration system.
Click the News Admin link in the main menu to bring up the news administration page. This page shows a history of custom news posts on servers across your Cortex cluster along with the form to add a new post and a quick settings form for post formatting. Only the admin or users with administrative privileges may access the news administration page.
Creating a News Post
The middle of the news administration page contains the form to add your own news post. Fill out the form with the following information:
| Subject | The title of your news post. |
| Body | Your news post. This can either be plain text, BBCode, or HTML if you are allowing HTML in your news posts. Note that it may be possible to break Cortex's home page with malformed HTML, so use it sparingly. |
| Engine | If your post pertains to a particular game engine you can select it in this dropdown box to have your news post marked with that engine's picture. Selecting "Cortex" will show the Cortex logo in your news post.
The "Custom" option in this list will add your custom logo to the news post. The custom logo is explained further in the Skinning Manual. |
| Servers | Select which server or servers in your cluster you want this news post to appear on. You can select any number of servers in this list or all of them, but you must select at least one server. |
Click the Add button to create the news post across your server and cluster.
Editing a Post
At the top of the News Administration page, find your news posting in the list and click the Edit link next to it to make changes. Cortex will then reload the admin page and allow you to edit the post. You can edit the subject, body and/or engine logo. Click on Save to save your changes.
 Note that if you created the same post accross a cluster you will not be able to edit that post on the whole cluster, but on individual servers within the cluster. |
Deleting a Post
At the top of the News Administration page, find your news posting in the list and click the Delete link next to it to delete the post. Cortex will then ask you to confirm the deletion. When you click OK, the post will be removed from the server.
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As with editing posts if you created the same post accross a cluster you will not be able to edit that post on the whole cluster, but on individual servers within the cluster. You cannot undo post deletions, so be sure you're absolutely sure you want to delete your post before clicking Delete! |
News Settings
The form at the bottom of the news administration page instructs Cortex how to interpret news posts. Set your preference on Cortex interpreting HTML in your posts here. Click the Save button to write your changes into the Cortex database.
The Cortex RSS Feed
The Cortex RSS feed.
The Cortex RSS feed filtered for America's Army news.
News posts from Cortex's upgate server are also available as an RSS feed. Point your RSS reader to the url feed://update.insomnia365.com/rss.php to keep in touch with all news coming from the update server. It's possible to filter the feed based on engine by adding the ?engine variable to the URL. Right now the engine variable can be set to the following:
| aa | Americas Army |
| bf1942 | Battlefield 1942 |
| bf2 | Battlefield 2 |
| bfvietnam | Battlefield Vietnam |
| cod | Call of Duty |
| cod_uo | Call of Duty: United Offensive |
| cod2 | Call of Duty 2 |
| cortex | Cortex |
| cstrike | Counter-Strike |
| cstrikes | Counter-Strike: Source |
| czero | Condition Zero |
| dc_final | Desert Combat Final |
| dod | Day of Defeat |
| fear | F.E.A.R. |
| halo | Halo |
| hlds | Half-Life |
| mohaa | Medal of Honor: Allied Assault |
| mohbt | Medal of Honor Allied Assault: Breakthrough |
| mohpa | Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault |
| mohsh | Medal of Honor Allied Assault: Spearhead |
| ns | Natural-Selection |
| rtcw | Return to Castle Wolfenstein |
| rtcw_et | RTCW: Enemy Territory |
| sof2 | Soldier of Fortune II |
| srcds | Half-Life 2 |
| tfc | Team Fortress Classic |
| ts | Teamspeak |
| ut2003 | Unreal Tournament 2003 |
| ut2004 | Unreal Tournament 2004 |
| xpack | BF2: Special Forces |
| XPack1 | The Road to Rome |
| XPack2 | Secret Weapons of WWII |
For example the URL to view only news related to Cortex is feed://update.insomnia365.com/rss.php?engine=cortex while the URL to view only Battlefield 2 related news is feed://update.insomnia365.com/rss.php?engine=bf2.