Doc87: Embedding Sections in Articles

Title: Embedding Sections in Articles

As of version 3.7, Traction allows users to define their own sections and embed them in articles. This lets users display a list of links or even full articles within the body of an article. This has many useful applications.

Maybe you want to have a page that dynamically lists all meeting notes or open issues or HR policies.
Maybe you want to create a custom start page, like the front page, but customized show content ordered in the way that delivers you the cross section of content that you need to see when you open Traction.
Maybe you want to make a wiki-style page to take over the Project Newspage, but you want it to include dynamic link lists.

Embedding user-defined sections in an article handles all these use cases and more.

Sections can be based on static lists of links, a collection you have in your Collector, or a query for any cross section of content.

The same principles apply here as in Changing Front Page and Newspage Section Layouts.

Back in the help topic Making Links to Traction Articles, the example was an article with links to HR Policies. If a new policy is added, the author would have to edit the article and insert the new link to keep it current. Since all the target articles have the Policy label, using an embedded section to dynamically aggregate content would have made more sense!

Here is the article as it was published with written links:

Clicking Edit Article shows the text and the links:

Now click Edit Sections to create a section. The Edit Sections Dialogue appears, and we can define our section to pull in all articles with the :policy label:

You can define any number of sections to embed. In this case, we only need one. This section is configured as follows:

The ID is policies. This will be used in the article body to create a reference to this section that Traction will replace with the actual section itself when displaying our article.
The section will show a section title and an Add Article button.
The section query is Label-driven (rather than Label Added, Label Removed, a Collection, Recent Articles, or Specific Articles). The label is Policy.
The section will ignore the date range selected by a user when viewing the article.
The contents of the section will order alphabetically (rather than forward chronology, reverse chronology, or random)
The section will display only article titles (rather than including article details, content snippets, brief content, or full content)

We can click OK to return to the Edit Article window, where we delete the old static list of articles and replace it with the syntax for including our section:

Now we click Submit to republish the article to reflect our updates. It now displays the section we've defined, in the location in which we indicated we wanted it displayed:

Now, if any post is added with the Policy label from the HR project, it will appear in this list automatically. Additionally, anyone with the appropriate Author permission can easily add to the section by clicking the Add button, which will bring up a Create New Article window with the HR Project and the Policy label selected.

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referenced by (2)

Doc357: Traction User Guide Doc166: Making Links to Traction Articles

Article: Doc87 (permalink)
Date: March 22, 2008; 3:56:53 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Author Name: Documentation Importer
Author ID: importer