The Story content type is used for narrative time-bound text that will be shown in a list with other stories related to your site. Stories can be formal press releases or informal blog posts. You can also use the Story content type to link out to news and blog posts about your work on other sites.

General Fields

Title

The title field is required and will be used for the text of links to your story when shown in lists of stories.

Byline

The Byline field lets you set the author(s) of the story. This is a tag-field where you should separate each author with a comma. The authors do not have to be users in the site. For instance, you could create an “Office of Fun Stuff” author for stories you want to credit to everyone in your area. This is also handy when linking out to third party news sites.

Each author in the Byline will be displayed as a link below the story’s title. Clicking the link will show a list of stories by that author, so you should select an existing author’s name when using this field if you want to include them in credit for the story.

The editing interface for the Byline field showing two values, "First Author" and "Second Author" separated by a comma.
The Byline field on the Story content type.

Options Fields

External URL

The Story content type can be used to link provide a stub post that links out to articles on other websites. For instance, if The Middlebury Campus writes an article about your area, you can include a link to the article here. You will still be able to edit the story if you have permission to edit stories, but other users who click the link to this story will go to the Campus’ website to read the article.

When using this field, you should still add content to the Title, Byline, Featured Image, and Blurb fields.

Current Featured Story for the Main Newsroom

If you have the Operations role in the site, you will see this checkbox. Selecting it will make this the featured story in your site’s main newsroom, which will sticky it to the top of the story list and show a larger photo. If there is another story that is currently the featured story in the main newsroom, checking this box and publishing the story will replace the previously featured story.

This only applies to the main newsroom of a site. If you are working in the Offices and Services site or a custom Newsroom in a school site, this checkbox will not affect your office or custom newsroom page.

Video

The Video checkbox will add an indicator icon to the featured image when the story is shown in a list of stories to let people know there is a video available in the story.

Categories

If your site’s main newsroom or custom Newsroom uses categories to categorize posts, you’ll see checkboxes here for the various categories to which a story can belong. You can select one or more of these and when a person clicks the category link in the newsroom sidebar, this story will appear in that list.

Teaser Fields

These work the same as Teasers for other content types, however, it is strongly recommended that you add a Featured Image and Blurb for each story you create. When the story is viewed in a list of stories, which it will be on newsroom, category, and author list pages, these fields are displayed to describe the story.

Components Fields

For More Information

This field is displayed at the bottom of stories and is intended to be used in the same manner as the Media Contact field in the previous version of our site. In addition to listing people to contact about the story, you can include links to supplementary information.

Show Featured Image

The Show Featured Image checkbox controls whether the featured image is displayed when viewing the individual story. Featured images are always shown in lists of stories, but you may not want to lead the story with that image.

Opening Paragraph

Text in this field will be displayed above the text of the story in a slightly larger size font. This should be limited to one or two sentences and never more than one paragraph.

Components

See our documentation on Components for general information about how these work. The components which are available for the Story content type are:

Related Fields

Related Reading

You can choose up to three related stories to show in a list at the bottom of this story.

Scheduling Options

The Story content type is unique in that you can choose to have it pre-written but not published until a particular date and time.

At the bottom of the editing form is the Save as select box that controls whether the story is in Draft, Published, or Archived mode. To use the Scheduling Options, leave this as Draft. If you select Published and Save, the Story will be immediately published.

In the right sidebar, select the date and time in the Scheduling Options section when you would like the story to be published. If you choose a date and time in the past, the story will be immediately published, but it will show that date as the publication date for the story. If you choose and date and time in the future, the story will remain as a Draft until that time.