Most projects have a "News" section on their front page.

This is typically implemented using BOINC's forum system.
News items are stored as threads in a special forum,
named 'News' by default
(you can change this by defining a constant NEW_FORUM_NAME in project.inc).
This forum should have 'is_dev_blog' set to 1,
so that only project admins will be able to create threads
(non-admins will, however, be able to reply to threads).
The forum-creation script ops/create_forums.php creates this forum.

To show news items on your front page, include
{{{
show_news(0, 5);
}}}
in your index.php (the "5" says to show the 5 most recent items).

Prior to 12/2009, news was stored in a flat file html/project/project_news.inc.
To convert this to forum format, run the script html/ops/news_convert.php

== Temporary news items ==

You may want to show "temporary" news items,
e.g. saying that your project is offline.
To do this, copy html/user/sample_motd.php to motd.php
and edit it.

The resulting items will be shown at the top of your news if you put

{{{
include("motd.php");
}}}
just before show_news().

If your database server is down,
only temporary news items will be shown.