G2. Creating a Story

Most of what goes for a page is also true for a story. You can largely consider the two types to be interchangeable, and it is goodness to have at least two content types because conflicts can arise in the way content types are used (for example, taxonomy "collisions").

Stories have a "teaser" or opening statement intended to grab the reader's attention. The length of the teaser is set in one of two ways:

• In Administer>>Content management>>Post settings. The default there is 600 characters. You can change that.
• By specifically identifying a break point with < !--break--> [without the space] in your content (before the default limit).

Note: You may see some places that tell you to use <break> to set a teaser point. This was originally changed in 5.0 and created a considerable controversy, so it was backed out.

A story probably shouldn't have a menu entry. If you use the general "convention" that a "page" is for static or generated content that stands alone, and "story" is for collections of related content (e.g. RSS feeds, newsletter articles, press releases, etc.), then a story is usually going to be displayed with other stories, so which one would be the menu item? Generally the menu for a set of stories will be a description of how they are selected for display.

You may want to promote the story to the front page. For your "Welcome" message, you probably also want to make it "Sticky at top of lists." Unfortunately, there is no core "weight" feature, so you have to play with the dates and times in the "Authoring" section to control the order. (Or you can use the Weight module.)

What's a Teaser?

This is from a post by zoon_unit on January 10, 2007.

A "teaser" is essentially a snippet of text designed to tell the user the content of a post without reading the entire post. Since most writers have embraced the common journalistic style of explaining the nature of an article in the first paragraph, teasers work well for most articles.

Here's what happens:

1. A node contains an entire article.
2. Drupal's "teaser" function, "node_teaser," strips the first x number of characters from the article and makes it available as content. The exact length is determined by the value set in Drupal's Administer » Content management >> Post settings.
3. So, you list a bunch of articles on a page. You want the articles to display only a snippet of text from the full article, so that you can fit a bunch of articles on a page without requiring the user to page down through tons of text. If the user likes the "teaser" content of the article, they will click on the article's title and see the full content of the article on its own page. In a sense, teasers function like summaries of an article, except that the software decides where to cut off the text. If you want to determine where a teaser article ends, you can insert the comment tag to instruct Drupal exactly where to fashion the break between full text and teaser text.