Nancy's Web If you don't know where you've been, how do you know where you are?

Most of what goes for a page is also true for a story.

Stories have a "teaser" or opening statement intended to grab the reader's attention. The length of the teaser is set in one of two ways:

• In Administer>>Content management>>Post settings. The default there is 600 characters. You can change that.
• By specifically identifying a break point with “<!--break-->” in your content (before the default limit).

Note: You may see some places that tell you to use “<break>” to set a teaser point. This was originally changed in 5.0 and created a considerable controversy, so it was backed out.

A story probably shouldn't have a menu entry.

You may want to promote the story to the front page. For your “Welcome” message, you probably do want to make it “Sticky at top of lists.” Alternatively, you can give it a light “weight.”

What's a Teaser?

This from a post by zoon_unit on January 10, 2007.

A “teaser” is essentially a snippet of text designed to tell the user the content of a post without reading the entire post. Since most writers have embraced the common journalistic style of explaining the nature of an article in the first paragraph, teasers work well for most articles.

Here's what happens:

1. A node contains an entire article.
2. Drupal's “teaser” function, “node_teaser,” strips the first x number of characters from the article and makes it available as content. The exact length is determined by the value set in Drupal's Administer » Content management >> Post settings.
3. So, you list a bunch of articles on a page. You want the articles to display only a snippet of text from the full article, so that you can fit a bunch of articles on a page without requiring the user to page down through tons of text. If the user likes the “teaser” content of the article, they will click on the article's title and see the full content of the article on its own page. In a sense, teasers function like summaries of an article, except that the software decides where to cut off the text. If you want to determine where a teaser article ends, you can insert the comment tag to instruct Drupal exactly where to fashion the break between full text and teaser text.

NOTE: There is a bug in the core Node module. Check the issue status. It is a simple change (can be done manually) and must be applied in order for some modules to render teasers correctly. By the way, you might want to add your own experience to that bug report in order to increase its attention by the developers.