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Thursday, April 19, 2012

Short Article Description functionality change

You may have noticed that the functionality of the ‘Short Article Description’ section in your website editor (News section) has changed today.
SportingPulse has made an adjustment so that you are no longer able to select fonts and you are limited to the number of characters you can enter into this section (technically, we have removed the WYSIWYG editor from the 'Short Article Description').

This change has been made to benefit of the appearance of your website once news is published, and in particular, stopping your news section from breaking due to poorly formatted HTML.

We found by allowing full publishing features in the 'Short Article Description', editors were entering in whole articles and even videos into this area. In doing this the ‘News’ page on some websites had become extremely messy and hard to follow, and in many cases, using the ‘Short Article Description’ section incorrectly even caused breaks within the website.

SportingPulse does recognise that we've caused some confusion here, considering we did not place these restrictions earlier; however we are making this change to benefit everyone who views and uses your websites. Please remember when creating a ‘News’ item you need to enter the article and images into the ‘Article Content’ section. You have no restrictions in this area of your website editor. The ‘News’ section of your website is designed to display the ‘Short Artcile Description’ which viewers can read, then they can click on the ‘more’ icon to view the full ‘Article Content’.

This is the first of a few changes we’ll be making to news editing to ensure that news is easy to enter, and looks great when published to your website.

If you require more information or help with this change, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Happy Editing!

21 comments:

  1. Sorry but i really dont like this, we used to be able to have all our news items on the same page but now our users will have to open different pages to get all the stories. the 'more' link has always been too small and many users dont think or know they can click through to the article content.

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    1. Tell them to click on 'more'

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    2. annoying that "more" is always there whether there is anything more or not - granted it now displays the capacity to post to Facebook

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  2. This change has been very frustrating; it limits the functions of pages being used for different purposes like links to supporting sights, contact details/photos of individual committee members. (these are short entries and don’t take many characters and don't need to be linked to the article content section.) There are no pages appropriately set up for entering more than one contact/photo on the page. Instead of taking the functions tool from across the top how about just limiting the characters allowed in this area so that the short article section is capped. Thus allowing users the ability to still customise their website and making it user friendly for both the person updating it and the people using it. By taking the functions bar you have limited our Regions use of the web site greatly.
    AFLGSJ Newcastle Regional Committee

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  3. Ok, so you have limited our ability to change the font etc but on the news feed now the font in the article description is too small and is not in any way practical to be able to highlight the most important news feed by changing colour etc. Can you advise how we are now supposed to make the important news items identifiable from the rest? Many thanks.

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  4. Hi there - thanks for your comments. In all of them, it may be the case that you've been using this Short Article Description for your full articles - we'll write another blog tomorrow morning, because I'm sure we can help.

    It may actually be the case that you can use a different news layout to get a better result - if you right click on your 'news' menu in the admin CMS, there are 4 options for display - News Summary, News Detail, Fading News and News Feature (there's also an option for document admin).

    If when you post you want to put a link to your site, that's helpful - if you'd rather have a private conversation about it, please feel free to contact our Customer Service Team, as we haven't removed the ability for you to display all news articles on a single page; you may simply need to change the current template you are using.

    Cheers, Andrew

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    1. Thanks Andrew, I've changed our site to use the Document layout which suits our needs best.

      Regards Lindsay
      doncasterheightsjfc.org

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  5. We used the short section to hyperlink to articles in other menus within our website. The change means that this is no longer possible.

    Perhaps you need to create a section with top stories that links to other pages

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  6. The respositioning of the Sponsors, photographs and other sections make them of no value and better done away with.

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  7. Can you pls advise the font and size that now applies to the short article description so I can set my description to match my content.... I do miss being able to put weblink into the short article description which was very valuable when acknowledging sponsors....

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  8. Is it possible to make the short article description font bigger? I had been putting the first sentence or two in the short article description, and then just repeating it in the main body. I used Arial 3pt in a dark blue colour for all articles to maintain the consistency. The new short article descripition is very small - too small in my view.

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  9. The new font is way too small - try reading it on an ipad or iphone!

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  10. Hi Lisa - I checked out www.rollerblaze.com, as its the only reference site I could find in the comments (hard to know what site anon is from!).

    am a little confused - the font on your site looks great - i can't see where its too small. if you don't mind pasting a URL that I can check out would be great. there are a few people saying the same thing, so I suspect I'm wrong here - I just don't have a good example of the problem.

    Thanks all for your comments - we'll make sure it works for you, or that there's a good option to change the news type so it suits your need.

    Again, short article description was not designed for full news items - you can still use it, you just can't add HTML, large fonts, colours, videos, etc. otherwise, you can use a different section that gives a blof style of news entry... new blog coming on different news layout types.

    Cheers, Andrew

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    1. I fully agree with those above that say the font you are using is too small. We have always used the short article description as you suggest and found an Arial 12 point easy to read. I am very disappointed to read your reasoning to change it. You are punishing all of us who use it properly just to affect a few which is against natural justice. There are other ways to bring the few into line. I think it is more to do with saving mainframe space / money or else you have shares in glasses manufacturers.

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    2. Hi Andrew - my comment was not that the font is too small... although I think it is. My question was what is the font and size now for the short article description - just so as I can match the font in the content section... http://sportingpulse.com/assoc_page.cgi?c=1-7597-0-0-0

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  11. Cheers Ricky - So, simply, the font on short article description is a little small. No worries, we'll check it out.

    Thanks for the feedback all..

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  12. Actually, the short article description DOES accept HTML coding - thats how I've managed to increase the font size on this description section for our website, and also utilise such features as BOLD to highlight the key topic of the article. Try it, it worked for me :-)

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  13. Very small!! Please do check it out.

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  14. I agree with Ricky and those before him. I use the short article to highlight the story I am writing about and use "teaser" words to get everyone to click on "more". I also like to use this part showing different fonts to lead into the story. Now we have tiny writing which is not very easy for someone like me who likes to be creative in my writing style.

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  15. Hi Andrew,
    Just wondering if you have checked out the default font size for the short article description like you promised 12 days ago. 12 point Arial Black suits us. Be nice to have it done soon.

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