Creating Articles

To create an article, go to Content > Articles in the control panel and then click the Add Article button at the top of the page.

Articles are content that exists primarily on your site, rather than being a link to something elsewhere on the web (or in the physical world). (Note that we use the item type Web Article to store links to articles on other sites; here, we’re talking about your own articles.)

Articles have two primary content fields: the Excerpt and the Body. The Excerpt is shown on Category pages and is used in RSS feeds (by default; you can set up an RSS feed with the full content if you prefer). The Body is the full text of the article, and is shown on the Item page (that is, the article page).

You can, of course, create your own pages to display articles. The fields are accessed as <w:name /> for the title, and <w:author />, <w:published_at>, <w:excerpt> and <w:body />.

You can set a publication date for each article. By default, this is set to the date you create it, but you can set it in the past or in the future. If you set it in the future, the article will not appear on the public site until that date arrives.

You can associate an icon image with the article, which you can then access easily in the HTML that displays the article using WebvantaScript (using the <icon /> tag).

You can assign any number of categories to an article, and it will appear on all corresponding category pages.

As with other database item types, articles have a full set of metadata fields (page title, keywords, and description), which you can tune for search engine optimization.