The basic building blocks of the Peppered Platform
Although the Peppered Platform has a lot of features and options, the tools to create content are very simple. The two biggest pillars of content are:
- Pages/Stories
- Productions
NOTE: This article will be updated with the third pillar "People". For now you can read more about the new People feature feature in the People knowledge base article.
Productions are usually imported from a planning tool, while extra marketing content is added in Peppered. Sometimes pricing and availability are updated from the ticketing system. In this introduction we will not go into more detail about Productions. If you want to read more about them we have a knowledge base article all about productions. What we are going to talk about is Pages & Stories
So what is a page and what is a story?
In short, a story is a page, with some extra's. Pages and Stories actually use the exact same Dashboard module for creating the content, which makes it easy to create both.
(Read more about content layout options of pages / stories)
Basically, you can make a story out of any page, by just giving the page a "Story type".
While pages can only be accessed by a menu item or directly via a url, stories can be linked to other items and shown as little thumbnails on all sorts of other areas of your website. This makes them extremely useful to add depth to other content, and provide your visitors with new ways to navigate between different sections of your website.
This production page shows two related stories
How to link stories to other content
In order to make sure your beautiful story content shows up on other parts of your website, there are two main ways to organise your stories:
- Link your story directly to one or multiple productions.
This is very useful when you want to show the story on a related Production detail page, or the other way around, when you want to show one or more Productions on your related story page.
Because this link is done in the story in the Dashboard itself, this works best for simple links between a story and a Production. If you start linking a lot of stories to a lot of productions however, you might loose track of what is exactly linked to what. For that purpose we have a second option: - Group stories and Productions together in Collections.
In a Collection you can group multiple stories and productions together. This is particularly useful for online magazines, but also a very easy way to keep all your linked content up to date. You can easily add a new Production or new Story to this collection without having to keep track of which Stories and Productions are linked.
Just open the Collection and add new stories or Productions. The most recent stories will automatically be shown on any Production detail page that is part of the same collection. And a new story in a collection can automatically display Productions from the same collection.
Read more about setting up collections
Ok, got it. Now how can I show this on my website?
Now that you created multiple Story types and linked your Stories to Productions, it's time to decide how to implement this on your website. There are several ways in which this can be done. All you need to do is choose where you want to show your Stories or linked Productions, and how it should look.
Here's a quick overview of all options to show (thumbnails of) your Stories or Productions:
1. On the homepage
- Stories
This part on your homepage can display all your recent stories, or a selection based on one or more story types. Choose a grid or a slider. - Productions
You can show upcoming productions in multiple ways on the homepage. There is the "coming soon" list overview, and there are slider options for upcoming productions filtered by genre, type or location.
2. On a Production page
- Related stories
If you add the "related stories" to your general Production detail page layout,the most recent Stories that are linked to a production will be shown on that Production page. You will only have to do this once, since all Production pages use the same template. Thant means that any Production that has linked stories will automatically display these Stories. - Suggestions
Off course a Production page would not be complete with showing related Productions/suggestions. These can be picked by hand, or are randomly chosen from the same genre. This part is activated by default on your website.
3. On a page / Story page
- Related productions
On any Story page, select this part from the page part dropdown. All Productions linked to the current story will be shown in a list, grid or slider. - Theme list
To display all Productions from a theme - Productions in collection
Use this part as a part of your collection main page. Just add the "collection" part to your page, select the correct collection and set the part to display productions. All Productions from that collection will be shown in a list, grid or slider - Stories in collection
Use this part as a part of your collection main page. Just add the "collection" part to your page again, select the correct collection and now set the part to display stories. All Stories from that collection will be shown in a grid or slider - Stories
Use this part to create an overview of all your stories. The part comes with an optional filter for story types. You can use this part multiple times on different pages, by setting it to display only Stories of one (or a few) Story Type(s). - Suggested Stories
This part is useful if you want to display specific stories on your page. Since you cannot link stories to other stories outside of collections, this part makes it possible to just manually pick one or more Stories to show on your page / Story page
There are some settings you need to know in order to set up different options of these parts. We go more in depth in the knowledge base article of the Story module.
Other tools to create content
By working with Productions and Pages/Stories you will cover 95% of the content of your website. But there are some other tools you might want to look into for the other 5% of your website content.
- Banners
To bring extra attention to your content, you can use banners. They can be shown on different sections of your homepage, after a successful order, in the footer (for sponsors) and some other places. Banners are usually very temporary and can be scheduled.
Read more about banners - Template texts
All additional texts, instructions and buttons that are part of the website structure and flow can be edited in the "template texts" module. Just open the module and search for any text you want to change. Use this to give your own "tone of voice" to the website. Read more about template texts