Using The Categories Application
As an Editor, categories will be a very large part of your initial Ellington experience. Building a robust system of categories will allow your content producers to categorize their content appropriately and allow your designers to build effective sections and section fronts. Categories should be created as specifically as possible, so that content uploaded to sections and section fronts can be as refined as possible.
You can also create new categories to isolate important topics, such as a current election, a trial that has garnered public attention, or a highly followed sporting event such as the superbowl or the NCAA Final Four. These categories can then be pulled into special sections and section fronts to create concentrated and thorough coverage for your readers.
Adding a Category
- Locate Categories in the admin panel and click the "+" button next to the Categories model on the application models main window.
- Once inside the Categories model, you may also select the Add Category button at the top to add new categories.
- Select the Hierarchy.
- Select the parent category. If this is a top level category (like Sports or Travel) then select nothing.
- Type the name of the category.
It is important to use a category setup that makes sense for your group. If your publication does not feel the need to create a Sports parent category, Ellington does not require you to do so.
When creating a category, it is important to remember to be as specific as possible. A good example of a specific category is the [News]/Sports/Professional/Baseball/Royals category. This requires that a Sports, then a Sports/Professional/, then a Sports/Professional/Baseball/ category be created. However, this will enable your designers to create a ‘Royals’ section styling to drive up traffic during the baseball season. It could even be taken further to say [News]/Sports/Professional/Baseball/Royals/Pitchers. This will allow your content producer to create a story about Gil Meche and place it in the /Pitchers category. Categories will eat up a large amount of time early on, but having a robust category system will make your Ellington experience as smooth as possible.
Commenting
Managing the comments as a whole, either on or off, and selecting "per story" whether you can comment or not can become very tedious. As such, we have implemented category-level commenting. How this works is by default all categories are set to false. You can then open the categories you want, and select the "allow comments" box to allow users to comment on stories with this boolean selected.
Now, some caveats. If a story contains ANY category that doesn't allow commenting, then that will override the categories that do allow commenting, making it not contain comments. However, if you wish to override this, you can select "allow comments" in the story itself and that will override ALL the other settings.
Example: My Cool story has 2 categories, breaking news which doesn't allow comments, and news that does allow comments. Because breaking news doesn't allow commenting, the story won't' have the comments table. BUT, if I want to enable it for this story, I can simply allow comments on this one story and it will override the category commenting.
Templating Example:
for category in story.categories.all
if category.allow_comments
show comments
endif
endfor
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