Article Editor – Excerpt Section

Location: Content Management/Articles/Article Editor -> Display Section

Overview: The excerpt is an optional field available for you to use designed to host a brief amount of content that is directly related to the main body content of the same article.

The content in the excerpt section can then be utilized by a customized article display method designed to show a brief amount of content typically with a link to view more.

Note: with the intention of utilizing this type of display, you can use the excerpt field form the article editor to provide the brief content, however it is good to know that our custom article display methods can support two different approaches to showing a brief amount of content from the article.

See more about these two types of brief article display options.

Understanding Article Excerpt Display Options

It is good to understand the two options for showing brief content when it comes to articles. You can choose to use either the Excerpt Section of an article or you could choose to use what we call a Subset of the main body content.

Here is a brief review of the two different approaches:

Excerpt – The Excerpt approach utilizes the Excerpt Section of the article editor as illustrated above.

Pros: The benefit to this approach is you can control exactly what content is displayed as the brief content including images and highly formatted content. 

Cons: The drawback to using the Excerpt Section is that it can be difficult to control how the vertical height of the content will align if you have several articles placed side by side on a page such as having 2 or more columns in a row. So you would have to be very intentional about the content matching up, and be willing to edit your excerpt content to accommodate for that vertical alignment.

Subset – The Subset approach to providing a brief article display will utilize the first 300 characters from the main body content as found in the General Section of the article editor to automatically display as the brief content for the article.

Pros: The benefit of this approach is that you do not need to craft and manage an additional section of content in the article editor. Also, it is easy to control how the vertical height will align if you have several articles placed side by side on a page–due to the system pre-selecting the exact same amount of content being used in the display method.

Cons: One drawback to the Subset approach is that it will strip out any images or other content that is not text. However, we can add other fields form the Article Editor such as the Title, and Featured Image back into the display to create an attractive and uniform brief content display.

To help you better understand what options are available in our customized article display methods, please see this screenshot of the Article Display Method Editor.

Based on the brief summary of the variations outlined above here, you can decide which approach will work best for your needs.

Click Next to review the different sections of the Article Editor, or you may jump ahead to a specific topic by visiting the Course Content page for a linked Index.

Related Topics

• Article Editor – Name Field
• Article Editor – Display Section
• Article Editor – Featured Image Section

Common Questions

• How do I create an alternate article display method?
• How do I place an article on a page?
• How do I use categories in an article?