The General tab is the location of ALL the required fields that are necessary to add a story to the Ellington system.  Below we have outlined what each field is used for.

• Each story can have a kicker, but it's not required.
• Fill in the headline of the story.

3. If you have a subhead, enter it in the appropriate field. It is not required.

4. Select the lead author, bylines or one-off byline from the fields provided.

• Lead Author is a single lookup for the major contributing author.
• Bylines is a multi select for all of the authors that contributed.
• One-off bylines are for authors that are not part of the Ellington eco system such as gues authors.

• Select the checkbox if you would like to include the author's image on the story. (This will have to be implemented by a developer in your templates as part of your design if you want to use this feature.)
• Fill out the tease section with a brief summary of your story, it should grab readers’ attention. This field supports basic markup such as <strong>.
• Type the story content in the left-hand text entry box. Utilize the Story Editor button on top of the box to format text and add inlines. See our documentation on how to use the WYSIWYG editor for more information.
• Select the status of this story. (Selecting live will make the story visible on the site as soon as its publishing date/time is reached.)
• Select the site or sites you would like the story to appear on.
• If selecting more than one site, select the site the story originates on. (For proper accreditation))
• Enter an original publication date. This is the date the story will go live on the site if it's status is set to live.
• You may enter an Updated Date if you wish, in the case that more information is added later, you can show that the story was updated at this date/time.
• You can use the Unpublish at a date to embargo your stories. 
• Select the primary category from the single lookup.  This is a field that is primarily used in design when a category is needed to be displayed on the frontend. Since a story can contain many categories, the primary category is the top-level most category that you wish to use for display purposes. It is not required.
• Categories are, however, required.  Select as many categories as necessary. Categories are used for placement. Categories belong to sections, so by selecting a category you are deciding what section the story will appear in on your site.
• Select whether comments are enabled or disabled. After a story has run for a while, you can also select frozen comments, which displays comments already in the system but won't let users enter new ones.

That is all that is required to enter a story. All the other tabs across the top are supplemental information that is not required but may be part of your organization's workflow. They are laid out below.