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Prior to Linchpin Enterprise News 2.3, the teaser styles were defined via a News Teaser macro.

Since Linchpin Enterprise News 2.3 you can define the teaser styles directly within the blog post.


Defining news teaser information

Depending on whether the administrator has set a default image or not, your news could use said default image as a teaser image.

If there's nothing defined, the news tile will be of the type Title on color.

To set another type, click one of the options in the Custom section.


Activate custom teasers



You can activate custom teaser styles directly when writing or editing a blog post.

Make sure that you are in the edit mode of a blog post.

At the very top of the page, you will find a collapsable menu.

Click on the Additional information for this blog post button to open this menu.

Navigate to the News teaser options tab.

Here, select your teaser style.

For your teaser type you have the option to choose between:

  • Tile on color
  • Image
  • Video
  • Quotation


Title on color

Displays the news title on a tile with one background color.

The colors are pre-defined by the administrator. This teaser style works best with short titles.

Choose a color you want to use.

Click on the Save additional information button.

Tip

To pre-define news teaser colors, navigate to Confluence administration → Linchpin Theme → Configuration → Advanced styling options for Linchpin apps → Linchpin Enterprise News.

Scroll down to Title on color, color 1 and Title on color, color 2.

Choose the colors you wish to use for teaser styles.

Click on the Save button.




Image

For the image of your news, you have two options:

  • Upload an image
  • Search for an image from another Confluence page NEW IN 2.2.


Upload an Image

Click on the Choose image button.

You can either upload a new image or choose from images already attached to the news article.

Click on the Choose button.

Finally, click on "Save additional information" and then don't forget to save your update!


Please note

We recommend using images that are large enough to fill the available space.

While there is no recommendation for a perfect aspect ratio or an image size, we recommend using rather large images. If the image is smaller than the news tile, it will be stretched and, therefore, lose quality. However, it all depends on how you display news (small or big tiles, Cover Stories macro or other news feeds).

That's why Linchpin Enterprise News will automatically crop and scale images where needed.

However, for the sake of quality, we recommend to always use a height with a maximum of 1000px for the image and not to use text in the image. To have a nice and consistent view, the focus should be on the visual.

Warning

When using .png images as cover images, some color palettes might cause display errors.

We strongly recommend to use the PNG-24 format. 

We know, from our internal testing, that PNG-8 will cause display errors and advise to not use it for cover images.


NEW IN 2.2. Search for an image from other Confluence pages



Under "Custom" select Image and click on "Choose Image".

Within the now opened window, select "Search on other pages" on the left side.

Here, you can type in what you're looking for or select a space in the drop down menu. Once you've found an image click on "Choose".

On the right hand side, under the heading "Select important area" you have the option to either select "Automatic" or "Custom". With the "Custom" choice, you can mark the most important area on your image that you want to be visible.

Finally, click on "Save additional information" and then don't forget to save your update!



Custom selection of important image areas (optional)

Linchpin Enterprise News automatically scales and crops images. In some cases you might want to do it manually, though.


Examples when cropping manually is better:

a) You want to make sure that a certain person (for example the CEO) is included in the teaser.

b) Your image includes text (the software can't detect text and might crop it in a rather poor way).

c) You want to use a tall image for a wide tile → this might lead to problems with automatic cropping.


Automatic cropping

The automatic cropping failed in this case. Some characters are missing on both sides. The image doesn't look all too good.

Custom (manual) cropping

Everything is visible with the custom cropping, since we selected what has to be shown at any cost.



Within the News teaser options tab, if you select Image as your teaser style, a Select important area section will appear on the right side.

Click on the Custom button to manually choose the important area.

Here, select the area which under no circumstances should be left out of the teaser.

The cropping mechanism will always include the area you selected. Make sure that your selected important area is as small as possible, so that the cropping can still be semi-flexible. If your selection is very large, it might lead to problems (see examples below).


 



Some examples

(tick) Do: Set the important area as small as possible. The automatism will still use as much of the image as possible, but it will never crop away the face of the woman on the left.



Very tall tileSquare tileVery wide tile


What if we don't set an important area manually?


(error) Don't: Set a very large important area. If you define a very large "important area", the image will look awkward inside of news tiles that have a different aspect ratio.




Very tall tile

Square tile

Very wide tile




Video

Embeds a video into the news teaser.

Click on the news tile to open the video in an overlay.


To embed a video into a news teaser, select Video as the custom teaser display.

Then, provide an URL to the video (MP4, OGG file, Vimeo or YouTube).

Click on the Save additional information button.

Info

When using video teasers, Linchpin Enterprise News attempts to only load the metadata (for example: video length) and one image frame (to use as a thumbnail) to save bandwidth. After you click the Play button, the video will buffer regularly in any browser.

If you have questions regarding how to encode your self-hosted videos so they support this preloading functionality, feel free to contact us!


Quote

Displays a quote with or without a source.

The quote will be displayed as plain text on a single-color background (using the pre-defined news background colors).



Select Quotation as your custom teaser style.

Enter the quote.

You can also enter the source for the quote. (You don't have to, but quotes and sources go really well together (wink).)

Click on the Save additional information button.


Want to know how to create news? Click here!



This page was last edited on 09/28/2023.