Summary
A summary is a piece of text describing a page. The summary can then be displayed in a collection's index.
For example, a typical collection page contains summaries like this:
Note how the summaries link up to their respective pages in the collection:
As you make changes to the page a summary links to, the summary automatically updates itself.
Truncation
Often a page contains a large amount of text. If all of this text is included in a summary, and there are several summaries like this, it can make a collection page very long and difficult to read.
To solve this, Sandvox allows you to limit the length of summaries to a number of characters. This is known as truncation.
To truncate the summaries of a collection:
- Select the Collection in the Site Outline.
- Open the Page Inspector.
- Click the "Collection" disclosure triangle to reveal the full collection settings.
- Enter the number of characters to limit summaries to in the "Truncate text" box. Leave the box empty to impose no truncation. (Note that the number of characters is actually approximate. Sandvox will try to truncate at the end of a word, not in the middle of one.)
At the end of the truncated summary, a link will automatically appear that says "Continue reading" followed by @@ (which stands in for the title of the truncated item). Visitors can then click the link to be taken to the full article. You can edit this text, but whatever edits you make will carry over to the entire site, wherever truncation is used.
Custom Summaries
You can also give a page a custom summary. With a custom summary, the summary text is not automatically taken from the page it links to. Instead, you edit the text yourself, completely independently of the page's content.
This is useful if you find that a simple truncated text summary is not sufficient for a particular page. For example you could do something like this:
