Wednesday, August 11, 2010

about drupal teaser

A "teaser" is essentially a snippet of text designed to tell the user the content of a post without reading the entire post. Since most writers have embraced the common journalistic style of explaining the nature of an article in the first paragraph, teasers work well for most articles.

Here's what happens:

1) A node contains an entire article.

2) Drupal's "teaser" function, "node_teaser," strips the first x number of words from the article and makes it available as content. The exact length is determined by the values the admin sets in Drupal's settings page.

3) So, you list a bunch of articles on a page. You want the articles to display only a snippet of text from the full article, so that you can fit a bunch of articles on a page without requiring the user to page down through tons of text. If the user likes the "teaser" content of the article, they will click on the article's title and see the full content of the article on its own page. In a sense, teasers function like summaries of an article, except that the software decides where to cut off the text. If you want to determine where a teaser article ends, you can insert the comment tag to instruct Drupal exactly where to fashion the break between full text and teaser text.

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