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Content settings

When you add or edit a story, you can change more than just the title and body of the story. Edit one of your stories as we did before. Look at the parameters – they are divided into several groups:

  • Title
  • Menu settings
  • Body
  • Input format
  • Revision information
  • Comment settings
  • Authoring information
  • Publishing options

Aside from the title, which we already know about, we will discuss these groups below. The groups are generally collapsed by default. To expand a group to see its contents, click on the group name (eg click on Menu settings to see the menu settings options).

Menu settings

This is one group we wil not spend a lot of time on here, because it will be covered in depth later. It allows you to create a menu item which links to this story.

Body

You have already edited the body text for several stories. You will also notice a button at the top of this section, Split summary at cursor. This controls the teaser (ie the short excerpt of the page displayed in content listings).

By default the teaser is just the first 200 characters. You might prefer the teaser to stop at the end of a sentence or paragraph, rather than just stopping in the middle of a word.

Simply position the cursor where you want the teaser to end, and press the Split summary at cursor button. The teaser will be placed in a separate edit box (note that the main story window will display the teaser followed by the body text). Click the Join summary button again to turn this setting off again.

Try not to make your teasers too long, otherwise your front page will get very large and wordy.

Input format

Your content pages can contain more than just plain text. They can also contain markup which allows you to do things like:

  • Changing the font, for titles, emphasised and bold text.
  • Producing bulleted or numbered lists (like this bulleted list).
  • Including hyperlinks.
  • Including images.

Drupal allows you to do this using fragments of HTML. The input format determines whether you can use:

  • Filtered HTML. This allows a limited set of HTML features. It is safest if you are going to allow users to enter their own content.
  • Full HTML. This allows all types of HTML. It still filters potentially dangerous content such as Javascript or PHP code.

Markup is covered in detail in the next section.

Revision information

Normally, if you edit a story in Drupal, the old content is replaced with the new content. The old content is lost forever.

Using the revision system, you can keep old versions of the same story. If necessary, you can revert to an older version. This is very useful if you allow users to edit stories. If someone makes a mistake (or even if they deliberately trash a story out of malice), you can always get back to a previous good version.

Comment settings

Users can add comments to stories. This setting controls comments for a particular story. Options are:

  • Disabled. Comments cannot be added or seen. Use this if you don't want to let anyone comment on the story.
  • Read only. Existing comments can be read, but no new comments are allowed. Use this for older stories, or stories which have attracted a lot of comments and you don't want any more.
  • Read/write. Comments can be added and viewed.

Publishing options

Published controls whether the article is visible on your site or not. If an article is not published it will not be visible to normal users of your site. This is useful if you are working on a story but it isn't finsihed yet. You can save the incomplete version, without anyone being able to read it. It is also useful if you need to take a story offline without deleting it.

You might be wondering, if a story is unpublished, how do you find it to edit it (to change its status to published)? The answer is to use the Content management page.

Promoted to front page. Stories are automatically shown on the front page when they are published. If you don't want that for a particular story, turn this off.

Sticky at top of lists. Normally, as new stories are entered, they appear at the top of the front page. Older stories are pushed down the page and eventually fall off the bottom of the page.

Sticky stories always stay at the top of the page. This is useful for important stories which deserve to be up there for longer. Avoid too many sticky items, otherwise new content might not appear at all.

Authoring information

When a new story is added, Drupal records who added it (ie their user name), and the date and time it was created. This information is displayed at the top of each story.

You can change these settings here. Why would you want to? One scenario might be if a story is updated. Altering the creation date will push it back to the top of the front page, and make it clear that it is current. If the update is a significant rewrite by a different author, you might consider it appropriate to change the author information too.