Service Portal

Introduction

Content is king they say, and creating website content is one of the core jobs of many marketeers. 

In your Peppered website, different types of content can be created, like events, news items, pages, banners, and so on. So what's the buzz about this Story platform? 

Content is something that moves and evolves. It is relevant at one time and might get less relevant over time, or more relevant again in a different context. Content does not stand on its own, but is usually related to other content. Content comes in different forms and media. A video is content, as well as a podcast, an interview, a news item, and so on. All this content is created within a theme or story, within a bigger picture. It changes over time and it needs a structure that can cope with these changes, distribute relevant content easily to your website visitor and link to other content and events in relevant places, without hassle. That is why we created Stories.

We also seized the opportunity to simplify Peppered's platform functionality at the same time, so you can do more with fewer modules. A Story is anything that is not an event or product. Within the Story platform you can create new types of Stories and also manage your 'classic' Story types, like website pages and news items. All in the same structure, which is possible because we made them all the same underneath the surface.

Story structure

At the core of every Story is the structure of the familiar 'Pages' module (knowledge base article about pages) in the dashboard. Every page can be build up from a wide range of page parts. By combining these parts, the page is a very flexible medium for communicating your content. This principle can be used for a much wider range of Story types.  

There are features for adding meta-data, like Story types, for easy filtering and searching through content on the website.

Story types

To get started with different types of Stories, you first need to specify which type of Story you want to create. You can do this in the Story types module that you can find in the 'Content' panel in your dashboard (where you'll also find your 'Pages' module, since pages are one type of Story you can create.)

In the 'Story types' module, you can create any type of Story you like:

With the drag & drop feature you can order the Story types. This order will be visible on the website in the filter when displaying multiple story types in one place.

Important step in the process: give yourself and your colleagues the rights to the new Story types

After the Story types have been added, each Story type gets its own dashboard module, which is automatically created in the 'Content' panel. This will keep your Stories nice and structured, and also makes it possible to selectively give access to these modules to content creators. The new modules are not directly visible. You can give dashboard users access in the 'Dashboard users' module:

After this, your Story modules will show up in the 'Content' panel in your dashboard:

Creating a Story

Any Story you create will automatically get the correct story type. So if you create a new item in the 'Blogs' module, your Story will automatically have the type 'Blogs'.

You can also add extra Story types to the Story, if the Story belongs in multiple categories. Within the Story you will find a  multi-select box to manage the Story types of your Story:

The publication date is used for the order in which a collection of Stories is displayed on the website. For more on that, see below.

Each Story can also be linked to related productions, by selecting productions in the selectbox. 

This will be used to show relevant Stories on a production page, and vice versa: relevant productions on a Story page (important! to show the related productions that you have selected in this story, you need to add a Related productions part to your Story page, see 4. Related productions part on a Story page).

A new Soundcloud option for your Story page 

You can add all familiar parts you would find in a regular page, and build up your Story in any way you like. Start with an introduction, add a photo slideshow, embed a Soundcloud file, etc. 

That's right: the audio/video part has been adapted to also seamlessly display Soundcloud objects. Great for podcasts!

Displaying Stories on your website

Ok, so now you have created a lot of Stories, with many Story types, but now what?

We will keep adding ways and places to display Stories as the concept evolves. The following options are currently available:

1. Stories on your homepage

You can place a Story collection on your homepage. You can tweak this part in several ways:

• of course there is padding and background colour options
• choose a visual style, like a grid, a slider, or a wide slider
• choose which Story types to display in this part on your homepage. 

In this example, Story type 'Podcast' is displayed in a slider on home by filling in "3" in the "content_type" box:

2. Stories in any other page

In every page (or Story) you create, you can add a new Story part:

After adding the part, select which Story types you want to display in your Story page-part:

All familiar functionalities of page parts can be set. Like visibility dates and selective access for visitor tags.

But you can also set which Story types to display, and if you want to display this in a slider or a grid. And maybe add a filter if you are displaying multiple Story types:

All these parameters and all other parameters for other parts can be found in the overview of parameters in parts article.

In the example below we created a Story page-part for all Story types, in a grid layout, with a filter. (The general order of the Story Types in the filter can be changed by dragging these in the dashboard Story Types module):

3. Related Stories part on a production page

If you have added "related productions" in your Story, the Story can show up on all these production pages. To activate this, the "related Stories" part needs to be added to the production page layout. You don't have to do this for each production luckily; you can add the part at once for all productions, so that it will show related Stories on every production that is linked to one or more Stories.

In the Routes & Parts module, add a new item with these settings:

When that's done, admire your new related Stories on your production page:

A wide layout on desktop production pages for 1 or 2 Stories

A tiled layout on desktop production pages for 3 or more Stories

You can also add a heading to the part, by going to System > Template Texts and searching for FE3_relatedStories_heading. Whatever you fill in there, will automatically appear above the related stories part on a production page if there are stories linked to the production.

4. Related productions part on a Story page

It is also possible to show all related productions on the Story page itself. To do this, simply add the "related productions" part on the Story page you are building:

After adding the part, you can choose to show all related productions in a slider or in a default list view:

A slider of related productions on a Story page.

5. Suggested Stories

If you want to show a selection of (random or hand picked) stories beneath a Story page, you can add the part Suggested Stories to your Story page. 

When you open the part, you can select specific stories you want to show on the page or leave it empty. 

If you don't select anything, one of two things will happen: 1) if the page itself doesn't have a story type, the suggested stories will be selected at random; 2) if the page has a story type, the suggested stories will be selected at random within the same story type. 

You can also add a heading to the part, by going to System > Template Texts and searching for FE3_suggestedStories_heading. Whatever you fill in there, will automatically appear above the suggested stories part on the page if there are suggested stories to show.

Things to contact Peppered for

• When you can't find the page part in a page, we might need to add it for you, please let us know.
• When you want to configure the page part but don't know how the 'Routes & parts' module works.
• When you want a homepage part, but don't know how the 'Routes & Parts' module works, let us assist you with the configuration.

What's next?

The Story platform will be a continuous development. We are going to add many more exciting options, like linking Stories to themes, the possibility to add people to Stories, and much, much more. When new features are available we will add it to the manual. 

This development is sponsored by Amare and Voo?uit.