WordPress gets around this by using widgets, that will display n letters or what ever you define n to be. With tricks like this I don’t see the need to have pages have excerpts.
But I still don’t see the need for it, I haven’t seen another CMS that has pages / posts have excerpts for their pages in anyway shape or form yet. This was one feature I asked for 12 months ago, and was one that the more I thought about it, the more I don’t see it being required when there are ways to achieve what you want to achieve.
, that will display n letters or what ever you define n to be
lol, that works great unless you have a marketing department.
My last job built a custom ColdBox-based CMS for training content. Our marketing department loved customizing excerpts so much we had THREE description fields for each piece of content. Short, medium, and long. Since most of our content was for members only, we also had a “marketing page” version of each piece of content which was basically an upsell of why they should buy it, and of course, it used one of the excerpts which the marketing team would gleefully customize down to the word. We wouldn’t have gotten out of the gate with one of those “n numbers of letters things”-- not when you worked for a company that could spend 45 minutes in a meeting agonizing of the exact working of a single form field.
I’m being a little silly (though the stories i tell are completely true), but the moral is not everyone operates under the same requirements.
Thanks!
~Brad
ColdBox Platform Evangelist
Ortus Solutions, Corp
E-mail: brad@coldbox.org
ColdBox Platform: http://www.coldbox.org
Blog: http://www.codersrevolution.com
Which is why core should not have it, everyone’s needs will vary and there are ways to get around it and introduce the feature that you need.
For example I know a lot of you have read this post!
http://www.andyscott.id.au/blog/another-way-to-store-information-for-an-entry-in-contentbox
But the principle could be the same, where the custom field is changed to add the excerpt yourself. Like I said there are many ways to achieve what one wants to achieve.
Yes but for none technical editors/authors a custom field can be a bit intimidating. I feel having an excerpt for a page would be useful for everything from content lists with overviews of pages to search results. Having the content chop off after so many words is not a good solution for content writers. Providing a defined content area with WYSIWYG tools would be much more user friendly. It’s there for blog posts it’s not such a stretch to want it for pages after all blog posts are just a type of page.
If I’m honest it doesn’t bother me not having it but I can see how it could be a really useful/powerful feature for both me the developer and our clients so I’m voting for it.
Richard
Richard,
It is obvious that you didn’t read that post, and what it brings to the table. I understand what you are saying, but pages are just that pages and really aren’t meant for snippets of content like blog posts are.
That doesn’t mean it is not achievable either, as that blog post shows what one can achieve with a bit of imagination.
The reason I asked for an example of what you’re wanting to achieve, then we could easily sit down ad work with you in getting something up or show you how to approach the problem. But pages are not posts and therefore really shouldn’t need excerpts either.
I used the n letters, as that is how widget authors have been doing it in WordPress and other like CMS products for years, all without the need of the excerpt for pages.
Once this becomes core, then we might as well look at introducing another content type that is either not a page nor is it a blog entry, pages are more like mini templates to further information for a page that can be displayed on the menu system. So when we use the navigation or any other form of linking, what content should be displayed?
So again please give us an example where you believe this to be mandatory core code to ContentBox, and I will show you many ways to achieve that without page excerpts.
I have a some examples: One customer will use ContentBox to publish business related articles. A short teaser will catch the readers attention, before it goes to the details. An another customer sells some stuff of mechanical hardware. The Teaser will contain the basic description of the part and a link to the shop. After hitting the “read more”-Button, all details of the part will show up.
I will use ContentBox as a Knowledge Base for my business and for my passion as a racedriver: E.g. every racetrack will be described. The Teaser will show up the short and most used information, like phone numbers, location, length of the track, etc. The details will give in depth information about the track.
To have an excerpt or teaser makes sense to me. Publishing short and catchy informations in the teaser will get the readers interest, hoping that the reader will go into the details in the second part of the article.
Why it should mandatory for ContentBox? Some other CMS have this feature, some not. Having this feature might give one tick more in the evaluation sheet of a future customer.
cheers and thanks for the discussion.
Andrew,
No I haven’t read your blog post until I just skimmed through it now but I know exactly what custom fields bring to the table, and I still maintain that custom fields while extremely useful/powerful are not always suitable when dealing with none technical clients.
I did give some examples in the second sentence of my reply and Martin has given some great examples. Basically parent pages displaying overviews of their children just like the blog displays an overview of its child posts. I don’t understand why this is such a controversial feature request.
I also have to disagree with you on what pages are. In my opinion pages are exactly the same as blog posts with the exception of having the ability to be added to the navigation and choose different layouts. They are both just content wrappers.
I have seen page excerpts in many CMS systems, not all but some certainly do have it. Wordpress had it as a core feature in earlier versions and from a quick search you can see many would like it back. As I said before it doesn’t really bother me if it’s in or not. But it’s obvious that people (maybe not you) would find it useful.
Richard
This is what I am talking about, you are talking about actual content and not pages in those examples. Now there are two ways to tackle this, but the cleanest option would be to create a new content type. Might need to look at this option myself, as this has merits with something that I am looking at researching at the moment.
The second option is vary similar to the above, except that there are tables created for your new data. You then use this as your content, that is decoupled from what you perceive and people perceive as pages.
You then write widgets to then display the content, the way that you see fit to display the content. And you can then create pages to contain these widgets, or place the widgets anywhere you like.
This is the behavior that I mean that all CMS type applications do adhere too, the difference is applications like ContentBox and Wordpress to name a few, provide core features for developers to expand on.
I used that blog post as an example, to show how to add extra features like a related posts selection, or in your case you could add an excerpt to your pages, which is another way to skin the cat. All it was doing was using the custom fields, to provide extra information to a post or page, in a more visual meaning.
If people think about pages as a viewlet so to speak, as a container to show more content or text, rather than attempt to use it in the manner you’re attempting too, would make your job of expanding on ContentBox even better.
Not trying to persuade you, just trying to give another perspective on ContentBox.
Feature accepted and finalized in the development branch.
Ps. It probably took me less time to build this than to read the entire thread here. So for the future I would live to see more pull requests for things you would like to see in ContentBox. Take it as a challenge to contribute 
Feature accepted and finalized in the development branch.
Ps. It probably took me less time to build this than to read the entire thread here. So for the future I would live to see more pull requests for things you would like to see in ContentBox. Take it as a challenge to contribute
Can this be switched on and off? I have some sites where I don’t want my content authors using it.
