The Research Panel Area

The research panel area is an area at the bottom of the Content Studio window that can be used to hold research panels. The research panel area is hidden the first time you start Content Studio. You can display it by selecting View > 5 Show research panels or by clicking on the expand button ( ) at the center-bottom of the window.

Research panels are small plug-in applications that can be created by third parties to add functionality to Content Studio:

Three general-purpose research panels are delivered as a standard part of Content Studio:

RSS Feed

An RSS feed panel is a research panel containing links delivered via RSS. You can add any number of RSS feed panels to your research panel area, each displaying regularly updated links from a different RSS feed. Clicking one one of the links will open it in your browser.

Search

A search panel contains the results of an Escenic search - it's rather like a mini version of the main Search panel. You can add any number of search panels to your live panel area, each displaying the results of a different search. The search results can be selected and dragged in exactly the same way as ordinary Search panel results.

Related Content Finder

The related content finder searches for content that is similar to the current content item - that is, content that appears to be about the same subject. You can use it as a research tool to find more information related to an article you are working on, or to turn up a set of candidate articles for linking to. You can set up a related content finder panel to search using either Escenic Related Search (which searches your Escenic database) or Google News Search (which searches news articles on the web). You can, of course, add two related content finders to your live panel area, one set up to search internally and the other set up to search the web.

Web Browser

A web browser panel can display a web page. It provides an easy way to make external information available in Content Studio.

There are two types of web browser panel:

• User-defined browser panels that display pages you select yourself by entering URLs.

• Live browser panels that display pages related to the content item or section you are currently editing. This type of web browser panel is only available this if your Content Engine has been set up to enable it. For further information, see Configuring a Web Browser Panel.

All research panels have a refresh button at the right end of their title bars:

Clicking on this button refreshes the content of the panel. Note, however, that you can configure research panels to refresh automatically at specified intervals (see The Configure Research Panels Dialog.