Intro vs. Summary

Authored by: vdanen on Friday, January 11 2002 @ 11:12 PM EST

I think you should do both. =) I think some people will like the way it\'s currently handled, but some of us used to other software (like phpweblog) will really like a format that is familiar (I prefer the summary and story as two different things). Just to illustrate, in phpweblog a user can write a summary (optional) and the story text.

If the summary is empty, words up until the 255th (by default, it\'s definable) word are used as the summary. The summary is then displayed on the index page only, and the body text is displayed on the \"read more\" page only.

A much more elegant solution, I think. As it stands, right now the admin has to do the splitting and it has to be an a part of the entire story, so the first paragraph may not say too much about the overall story whereas a summary could illustrate a good overview of what the story is about.

(Anyways, having this format would have made my phpweblog->geeklog converter a helluvalot easier to write!)

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Authored by: tonylinde on Saturday, January 12 2002 @ 11:55 AM EST

Yes, I\'d vote for this solution.
__
Tony Linde

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, January 12 2002 @ 03:02 AM EST

I prefer the way is now implemented.I don't like the mentioned phpWeblog method, but it's only my opinion. żLet's Poll?

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, January 12 2002 @ 05:52 AM EST

In a simplistic answer you should be able to remove the from storytext.thtml.

Then the intro ( now summary) is displayed on the front page, but not on the article page view.

Of course there are other changes, but if any code changes are needed they should be made where it is the templates that decide what is output.

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Authored by: Tony on Saturday, January 12 2002 @ 08:06 AM EST

You know, I never thought for a minute that you could address this with templates (you are absolutely right). Only drawback I see with that is it would force a GL novice to learn the template system which may or may not be difficult (I would hope it wouldn\'t be too bad).

--Tony

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, January 12 2002 @ 07:29 PM EST

Forgot about the template substitutiion, the first line should read:

"In a simplistic answer you should be able to remove the {story_introtext} from storytext.thtml. "

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, January 12 2002 @ 07:20 AM EST

I\'d still like to see multi page article ala review sites like anandtech.

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Authored by: Falkware on Saturday, January 12 2002 @ 01:35 PM EST

I recommend doing both. Let people have the option to use either method when posting an article. That would put the control in the hands of the author/webmaster, and can create a nice combination of 2 looks within the same page, thus again driving the uniqueness level up a notch or two.

I know if I had the option to choose how the frontpage text was treated I would do a combination of the two, depending on what I was writing. I think that\'s the most important thing to keep in mind.

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Authored by: Jason on Sunday, January 13 2002 @ 08:24 PM EST

Evil Jason is in the house today!

My two cents will end up looking like a the buck fifty that won\'t even get you a coffee at Starbucks! Your overworked, thristy and still have a dam caffiene hangover.

Make the text of stories it\'s own table with a relation to the stories table. Then you could do all sorts of display posibilities. I would suggest:

If only one page, it all get put on the home page

If more than one page, page one is on the home page with a link to page two in the read more.

The story page lets you go back and forth though the story with any number of pages; including a link for a \"all on one\" page (no ad revenue here mister).

This is your topic, talk amongst yourselves...

-Jason (Sometimes evil, always good)

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Authored by: Tony on Monday, January 14 2002 @ 06:41 AM EST

I don\'t hate you. I have thought about doing something similar...just haven\'t had it come to a point where I thought enough people needed it and, as things stand, it works pretty good for me. Not sure about having an entire first page on the homepage, though. I still like having a short, say, 255 character field for the summary/intro. Then the actual story content can be broken up into multiple pages in a separate table.

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Authored by: lenz on Saturday, April 19 2003 @ 01:45 PM EDT

So there is no way at all to seperate the intro and the summary as the software currently stands? I cant find a hack and I have not been able to do it successfully myself - I am implementing a GL site for a client and they love it! However, the intro and summary being seperate is a stickler for how they want to use the site... Is there no way to do this now?

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 19 2003 @ 08:19 PM EDT

You know the code needs to be rewritten to do this. If you offer to pay, maybe one of the programmers would rearrange his schedule and add this feature for you right now otherwise it waits in the queue with all the other requests.

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