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What is the Cover Stories macro?
The Cover Stories macro allows you to place news prominently on any Confluence page.
The macro displays the latest blog posts/news from spaces you configured.
The new full-image design of the tiles displays the news in a very modern look.
Insert the macro into your page
First of all, insert the Cover Stories macro into a page. Often you will want Cover Stories to be displayed on a dashboard and/or the homepage of a space.
We recommend to use the whole available width of the page. Technically, it is possible to use only a limited width to display this macro - but Cover Stories looks best when at least 2/3 of the page's width is used.
Configure the macro
The configuration window offers several design options.
Layout & Sources
Layout
Choose from one of the following layout variations.
Four large tiles (2x2)
Two large tiles & two smaller tiles (2+4)
Eight small tiles (2x4)
One large tile (1x1)
Two large tiles (1x2)
Three small tiles (1x3)
Four small tiles (1x4)
Whether the tiles are displayed in a modern, full-image design or a classic design with separated title area depends on the configuration you made under Confluence administration → Linchpin Enterprise News → Design variations.
Different layouts (perhaps a layout of three tiles in a row or a column of vertically stacked tiles) can be achieved with a workaround. Use the single tile layout and embed the macro several times into a page.
Please note that you have to configure the news sources differently when using the macro several times on the same page!
In a single macro with several tiles, there'll never be duplicate news, no matter how you configure the sources.
But if you have several macros on one page, they can't check each other for duplicates. So three single-tile-macros that share the same source configuration will display the same news.
To remedy this, we plan to introduce a layout builder in one of our future releases, so you can build your own layout with an easy drag & drop-functionality.
Please note: If your configuration for a tile provides no news items, the respective tile will be left blank. Starting with fix version 1.5.1, if you have a full row of blank tiles, there won't be any placeholders for the empty tiles. Instead, the following content of your page will move up.
Tile height
Choose the height of the tiles. Please input only the number (the value px is added automatically).
Minimal height for a tile is 220px. Maximum height for a tile is 1000px.
Sources
Predefined channels
Select the checkbox Predefined channels if you want to decide which news (read: from which spaces and/or of which labels) are displayed to your users. You can select a source for each tile respectively.
You can choose from:
- News sections
Select all news sections (predefined by the administrator) which should be displayed in this tile.
Space and labels combination
Please note when choosing Space label combination:
Labels
Labels follow the "AND" logic. If you enter several labels, a news will only be displayed, if it contains ALL of the labels.
Example: You enter labels "news" and "washington" → Only news which are labelled with "news" AND with "washington" will be displayed. A news with only one of those labels will not be displayed.
Spaces
Spaces follow the "OR" logic. If you enter several spaces, a news will be displayed, as long as it's in at least one of those spaces.
Example: You enter spaces "Washington", "Frankfurt", "Soccer" → News from "Washington", "Frankfurt" OR "Soccer" will be displayed.
Empty fields always mean "any spaces and labels".
- News categories
Select all news categories which should be displayed. Leaving this field empty means that any category applies. If a news has no category, it won't appear here! If you select several categories, only news which have ALL of those categories will be displayed. - Single blog post
Enter the title of the blog post you want to include. This option will display this one specific blog post/news inside the tile.
- News sections
Personal subscriptions of users
Select the Personal subscription of user checkbox if you want your users to see news from spaces they are subscribed to.
This option will display a subscription button to users, so they can manage they subscriptions.
You will have to define which space categories your users should be able to subscribe to. If you leave this field empty, all spaces will be available for personal subscriptions. If you, however, enter any space category here, then only spaces which contain entered space categories will be offered for subscription. In this case, please enter every space category that is connected to spaces which should be available for personal subscription.
If all spaces that publish news have "news" as space category, you have to type in "news". Now, when users want to pick their spaces for their subscription, they will be offered all spaces with the category "news".
Slides
The second configuration tab is called "Slides".
Slide news inactive
Slide news active
Slide news
You can activate this feature by choosing an amount of slides in the Slide news drop-down menu. Slide news displays new news on another page within the macro - it works just like an image slideshow on any webpage.
Autoplay
If enabled, the slideshow will automatically shuffle between the pages of the Cover Stories macro.
Delay
You can enter any amount of seconds here. A delay means that the automatic slideshow will wait for the amount of seconds you entered before shuffling the pages.
Example: You enabled autoplay. You set the delay to 20 seconds. → Every 20 seconds the Cover Stories macro will shuffle between displayed news.
Tile elements
Here you can decide which elements of a news should be visible in the Cover Stories tile.
You can for example hide the author of the news, or the space it was created in.
On hover means that those information only appear when a user hovers over the tile with a mouse.
You can disable the hover effect. To do so, deselect the Active Mouse hover checkbox.
Title and kicker line will always be displayed and cannot be hidden, as well as the optical indicator if a news item is set to sticky status.
Want to know what other macros Linchpin has to offer? Click here!
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