Defining Summaries

The article links displayed on section pages are called summaries. A summary usually consists of a subset of the fields in a content item, which are displayed along with a link to the full content item. The fields that are to be used in a summary are defined using the summary element. In the following example:

  <content-type name="review">
    <ui:label>Review</ui:label>
    <ui:description>A product review</ui:description>
    <ui:title-field>title</ui:title-field>
    <panel name="default">
      <ui:label>Main Content</ui:label>
      <ui:description>The main content fields</ui:description>
      <ref-field-group name="title"/>
      <ref-field-group name="summary"/>
      <ref-field-group name="body"/>
      <ref-field-group name="review"/>
    </panel>
    <ref-relation-type-group name="attachments"/>
     <summary>
      <ui:label>Content Summary</ui:label>
      <field name="title" type="basic" mime-type="text/plain"/>
      <field name="summary" type="basic" mime-type="text/plain"/>
    </summary>
  </content-type>

the summary contains title and summary fields.

Note that the summary element has no effect on how summaries are created in your JSP templates: the summary template example listed in Summary Templates would work with the above content type even if it did not contain a summary element. The summary element is used by Content Studio to determine the content of the summaries displayed in section page editors.

The summary element is also used by the Content Engine, which supports local overwriting of summary fields. What this means is that when a section editor adds a content item to a section page, she can also make local changes to the content of the summary fields: a content item title that reads "England Loses Again" can be overwritten with "Humiliated!" on the section page without affecting the main title. If the same content item appears in a second section, it can have yet another local title there.

This functionality is "built-in" to the Content Engine: you do not need to do anything in your templates to enable it.