Overview
This guide provides an introduction to the key aspects of Article creation and maintenance on your Customer Self Service eCommerce Platform website.
Included for your website is BPD's out-of-the-box Article functionality, which can be used to publish content that changes based on posted, start and finish dates. Whether it's latest news, blogs or FAQs, our article system can help you present fresh content and communicate more effectively with your customers.
Enabling and configuring Article Maintenance
In order to maintain articles on your website, the Articles feature must be enabled and configured by the Administrator. These settings determine what your site's article creators can view and customise when creating article-related content.
- In the CMS, navigate to Settings → Feature Management → Content.
- Toggle on Articles, then click Configure.
- Toggle on Allow Article Filters if articles are to be restricted to certain segments of website users. If enabled, article writers can be set
- Toggle on Use Zoned Article Template if you want any article content on your site to use zoned templates. See Article templates help for more details.
- Toggle on Enable Article Template Override if you will be using customised article templates. Note that Zoned Article Template must be enabled as well for this feature.
- Toggle on Use SEO Url as Article Url if you want the SEO URL to be the article URL.
- To save your settings, click Save & Exit. Online maintenance of Articles, and Article Templates (if Article Template Override is enabled), in the CMS on the Content menu.
Article Types
Articles are grouped into various user-defined types, which can then be selected in article widgets to display. Grouping your articles helps to keep them organised by function or purpose. For example, you might create one article type for FAQs, another for blog posts, and still another for press releases, etc.
To create an article type:
- In the CMS, navigate to Content → Articles.
- Click Add New Article Type.
- Assign your new group a Code, a Name, and an optional Icon (for display in the CMS).
- Click Save. Once an article type has been created, you can add articles for it.
Articles
Once you've got at least one Article Type set up, you can begin creating the articles themselves.
- In the CMS, navigate to Content → Articles.
- Select the Article Type you want your new article to be grouped in.
- Click Add New Article.
- Enter a Description for your article. This will display as the article's title.
- The article's SEO URL, Browser Page Title, and SEO Description will also be auto-populated with the value you enter here. You can change any of these fields if you wish.
- The Posted Date will auto-populate with today's date. If you wish, you can also enter Start & Expiry dates for articles you'd like to display for a set period only.
- Select or upload a thumbnail image for the article. This will be the small image that displays when the list of articles is viewed.
- Select or upload the main image for the article. This will be the larger image that displays on the article detail page.
- Enter some 'teaser' text in the Summary section. This is the short-form content displayed when viewing a list of articles.
- In the Content section, enter the main body of the article. Use the WYSIWYG editing tools to update font sizes, formats, and colours based on your site's style guide.
- Article Filters allow articles to be displayed only to a certain segment of site users. You can enter one or more Filter values: Customer Types, Customer Warehouses, Customer Codes, Bill to Customer Codes, Email Addresses or Roles.
Note - this function works only with standard article widgets. It will not work with custom widgets. (TIP - If you do not see this function, it has not been enabled. Go to Article Feature Settings and toggle on 'Allow Article Filters'.)- Features are metadata you define for use with article filtering in an article list page, to help website users find relevant articles. Feature and feature values should be highly meaningful to your article content. Think of a 'feature' as a category and its 'values' as subtypes of the category. As an example, suppose your business sells homewares and produces feature articles on products and designs for different rooms. A 'feature' could then be 'room type' with values such as 'bathroom', 'bedroom', 'loungeroom' etc. Articles can be tagged with particular features and values. Using the Features functionality, visitors to your site can filter for articles about decorating a particular room type, e.g., 'bathroom' or 'bedroom'.
You can add as many features as you require.
In Feature, enter a name for the category. In Value, enter the subtype of this category. Note - for the filters to display when articles are listed, see the how-to guide on Adding a Feature Filter.
How site visitors use feature filters:
13. Click Save & Exit.
Article Templates and Widgets
How an article list (articles of an article type) and an article's content are arranged on a page depend on the template used, and also if article widgets have been inserted and configured within each template. There are 3 standard built-in templates for articles (in Content → Pages & Templates).
- Article List Page - default template for listing articles of a defined type on a page. This is automatically used if 'Use Zoned Article Layout?' is not enabled in the Article List or Article List All widget.
- Article List Item Zoned - template for listing articles if 'Use Zoned Article Layout?' is enabled.
- Article Page Zoned - zoned template for the article's content (i.e., the detail page the user sees when they click to 'read more') if the 'Use Zoned Article Template' setting is enabled.
Depending on your site's requirements and version, you can use these templates, edit them, or even override them and use custom article templates. For detailed help with these templates, see Article Templates help.
Each of the above templates uses various widgets to display the article content. For example, your article page zoned template might have the following widgets:
You can drag and drop these widgets to rearrange them into a different order, if you wish. Or if you want to get really creative, you can use the Layout Creator to customise the look and feel of this page completely.
To access any of these templates and configure the widgets in them,
- Navigate to Content → Pages & Templates → Articles.
- Click Design on the template you wish to update, then add / edit / remove widgets as required.
You can also add an Article List widget or an Article Slider widget to any custom page. In this case, the 'Article List Page' template would not be referenced.
Use Articles for FAQs
Want to use the Article system to display your FAQs with a toggle effect? Check out our 'How To' guide here.
Additional Information
| Minimum Version Requirements |
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|---|---|
| Prerequisites |
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| Self Configurable |
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| Business Function |
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| BPD Only? |
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| B2B/B2C/Both |
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| Ballpark Hours From CV (if opting for CV to complete self config component) |
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| Ballpark Hours From CV (in addition to any self config required) |
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| Third Party Costs |
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Related help
Related widgets
