Stories app

This page describes how to use the Stories app, an example of a custom content editor that authors can use to quickly create and publish flexible content in Magnolia. 

Use the Stories app to create and edit stories on a Magnolia author instance. Complete the structured outline to give the story a set of key, static properties. Then build up the unstructured body of your story using content blocks you want: images, texts, videos and links. You can save and publish in one click to get your content on your website fast.

Compared to pages, stories are ideal for quickly producing free-form content without any page-hierarchy constraints. Stories, with a clear distinction between formatting and content, can then be published to different destinations: from a web page to a mobile app or as an article for an online newspaper. 

Stories

You create stories in the Stories app.

To add a new story, click Add story. You can organize your stories by adding folders.

Demo stories

If you have the Magnolia demo modules installed, the Stories app contains some sample blogposts to show what you can do with the Stories app. Without the demo modules, the Stories app does not contain any content by default.

In the demo, the Stories app has been decorated to extend the default functionality described in this page. The customization of the Stories app introduces new blocks, changed outline properties, sample content and templates for rendering the content.  

Outline

When you create a new story, it provides title and lead text fields as well as several collapsible multi-field sections where you can fill in some key properties. 

By default, the outline consists of the following fields and collapsible sections:

• Title* - The title of the story.
• Lead text* - The lead text for the story.
• Lead visual - Collapsible section where you can select the Image, Video or Embed visual option:
  • For the Image option, you can select an asset from the Assets chooser dialog and add Alt text.
  • For the Video option, you can select a video asset from the Assets chooser dialog and add another asset as an Alternate image. 
  • For the Embed option, you can embed HTML code and add an asset as an Alternate image.
  • In all cases, you can select a Caption and  Credits.
• Author  - Collapsible section where you can add:
  • Author name
  • Author profile image with the Assets chooser.
  • Author short bio - A text field with a maximum of 300 characters.
  • Author lives in - For the location of the author.
• Related content - Collapsible section where you can add a list of related stories.
• Dates & url* - Collapsible section where you can add:
  
  • Story created on*
  • Story updated on

  • URL slug - Used as the name of the story and in the URL. If you leave this field empty, the URL slug is automatically generated from the story's Title when you first save the story.

Mandatory fields are indicated by an asterisk.

Blocks

Once you have completed the outline, you can add, reorder and delete content blocks to suit your requirements. 

Magnolia provides the following block types out-of-the-box:

•  Text 
•  Image 
•  Video 
•  Content from another website
•  Date

To add blocks to your story, hover over the  plus icon in your story to expand the Block chooser toolbar and select the type of blocks you want.

You can also expand the toolbar to open a Block chooser dialog.

To delete a block, click the wastebasket icon to the right of the block or use the backspace shortcut.

Text blocks

Add text blocks to write paragraphs or headings. Each paragraph or heading must be a separate text block. You cannot use line breaks within a block. If you press enter while typing, a new text block is created.

You can format the text and insert or remove links to external content or to Magnolia items using the formatting bar displayed when you are editing a text block.

If you apply a header style to text in a block, the entire block becomes a heading. 

If you paste text from another source into a text block, all formatting is removed. If you paste several paragraphs at the same time, multiple corresponding blocks are created.

If you insert links in a text block:

• Use the  external link icon to link to external URLs or emails.
• Use the  internal link icon to link to content in another Magnolia app. By default, you can link to content in the Assets and Pages apps from the Stories app.
  

Image blocks and video blocks

Add image or video blocks to select an existing asset or upload a new one. Magnolia uses basic mtk components to embed images and videos in your stories.

Click browse to open the Assets chooser dialog and select an asset for your story or upload a new one. You can also add image-related or video-related metadata.  

Image block:

Video block:

Content from another website blocks

Use content-from-another-website blocks to embed content from another external website.

This block uses link unfurling: it scans the URL you enter for metadata and provides a preview in the story. For example, this YouTube link displays a thumbnail preview, title and lead text: 

Publishing stories

When you have finished writing your story, you can directly click Save and Publish at the bottom of the story. Alternatively, you can select a story in the workbench and click Publish. The publication process and statuses are explained here.

The Stories app does not provide any default page or component templates to render the stories. The templates to render the stories must be configured by your development team. The templates provided by the  article-editor module may be used and adapted for this purpose. You can see an example of published stories in the Magnolia demo. 

Shortcuts

The Stories app supports several shortcuts to make editing more user-friendly. The shortcuts vary depending on if you are editing a block (edit mode) or not (select mode).

Multilingual content

The Stories app doesn't yet support multi-language content.