What will I learn to do?
The fields available for an article, in the private area:
When you are working with a content management system (CMS), it’s important to know the terms that are used and understand how each part of the articles function.
In this lesson, you will learn about the parts of an article (such as the Title, the Subtitle or the Deck) and a news item, including their journalistic qualities and some alternative names for them.
You will also learn how the parts work and are displayed on the SPIP site.
Some parts of an article, such as the Top title, may not be used on your site.
The administrator might have disabled them, so the fields will not appear anywhere in the private area.
How do I identify the main parts of an article published online?
First, let’s look at an article as published, in the public site.
You’ll notice that there are fields above the main part of the story.
There may be as many as six, if your administrator has enabled them.
There are four main ones, and they may look familiar to you - you’ve seen them in a printed newspaper.
These are the titles, or headlines. They are the short and interesting story captions that grab the audience’s attention and tell them what the article is about.
This article shows every possible part in order to demonstrate what they are.
However, it is unlikely that your site will use every part for all articles, as it makes the article cluttered.
View the different parts of an article on the public site
Top title
This is also called an overline, a kicker or a label.
The Top title can be a subject or category of article, or a descriptive term. It might name a place.
It is all in capital letters.
Title
This is a the only mandatory part required for an article (together with the body text of course!)
It is the main title, or headline, of the article.
The title follows the article everywhere. You can see that it is shown at the top of the page, in the path from the Home page.
Subtitle
This line expands on the main title.
Sometimes journalists call this a subhead or underline or deck head (however, in SPIP, “subheadings” are within the text of the article and a “deck” has a different function, as you will see below).
The subtitle displays in a smaller font than the title, so it can be longer.
How do I write good titles?
The top title is meant to be just one, two or three words.
It can be a category of article (national, analysis, breaking news) so that it functions like a logo to distinguish a general type of story. Or it can be a descriptive term about the subject (elections, corruption, protest).
The top title might also be the name of the geographic area that the article is about, or where it was actually written. In this case, the top title functions like a dateline.
Your site should follow a consistent style about the use of the top title.
The main title should be short – the number of words depends on the design of your site, but a rule of thumb would be 5 or 6 words.
A good title should use an active verb, not “is” or “says”.
It should also be clear – that means not using names of people or places that would be unfamiliar to most of the audience, and not using acronyms or jargon.
The title is meant to attract the reader to the story, so it should give them enough information to make them want to read on.
The subtitle continues from the main title. It might offer more detail or a secondary element of the story.
Do not repeat words from the main title in the subtitle. This will make the subtitle boring and give the reader the impression that there is nothing new to be learned from reading further.
It is about twice as long as the title in the number of words – 10 or 12 words.
