How to create features

step 1. log in and set your editor mode

Once you have logged in set your editor mode to 'edit content' (this should be the default so you only need to do this if you have changed the default).

step 2. create or select the content to be featurised

There are two different ways to featurise content

1. upgrade an existing article
2. create a new feature from scratch

If you want to create a brand new feature as in option 2, just go to the publish form and select 'feature' as the type of your article. If the feature type is not avaialable in the form, you do not have sufficent permissions to featurise articles or you are not logged in.

If you want to upgrade an article, find the article and click the 'upgrade to feature' link above its title.

step 3. edit your feature

When you create a feature by upgrading it or by publishing a new feature it will be hidden by default. find the feature and click on the 'edit' link above it. This will bring you to a form where you can edit the feature.

The feature form has some special fields and it works like this.

The content field contains the content that will appear on the feature page - note this is a html input form normally and you will need to put in elements like <P> in order to get paragraph breaks. You can also use html tags to put in links and images as well as oscailt macros (see OscailtContentMacros for more details about these).

The extra content field contains content that will appear only on the article view page - this allows you to show the introduction to a story on the feature page and continue it on the main article page.

There are 3 checkboxes which allow you to choose how the story attachments and summary are displayed.

The show attachments on feature page box allows you to choose whether attachments appear on the feature page or only on the article page The show summary on article / feature page boxes allow you to choose whether the summary of the story only appears on the newswire view of the article or appears on all pages.

Step 4 unhide the feature.

Once you are happy with your feature, you can unhide it. This will allow users to see it on the feature page.

note if you upgraded a story you will be given the option of merging it with the original - this will copy all of the comments from the original newswire story to the new feature. If you do not select this option, the original newsire story will remain and the new feature will be a new story with no comments.

-- ChekovFeeney - 19 Feb 2006