Content properties for specific content titles

The Sportal365 CMS offers several sections with content properties to categorize, optimize, enrich, and organize articles, videos, and galleries on your website.

Placed under nine tabs–General, Media, Content footer, Tags, Related content, URLs, SEO, List, and Custom data, think of these content properties as features that help make your content better and fit for an online world.

Although the content properties follow almost identical logic, there is a slight difference in sections with some content types.

Note that Images are a content type that is not optimized through the content properties as the rest of the content.

In the following sections we explore each content property tab in detail:

The General tab lets creators set categories, authors, status, distribution channels, comment policies, properties and publish dates for the three main content types–Articles, Videos, and Galleries.

Main Category

To have a category is mandatory for creating an article, video, or gallery.

Categories are general topics or the table of contents for your site. Categories are there to help identify what your article is really about. This means that before anyone can use the CMS to create content, a category must be created.

See How to create a Category.

In the Category field, select the general category that your content must fall under. For example, if you are writing an article about football, you can select the Football category as the main category.

Note that you can add only one main category here.

Additional Categories

Additional Categories are sub-categories of the main category you have decided to place your content under, say, Football.

So, if your content is under the main category “Football” and you add an additional category “Premier League”, it will appear in both sections (Football and Premier League) on your website; together with all other content tagged with the same categories.

Note that you can add more than one additional category

Author

Every article, video, or gallery has an author and the Author field is where you enter the author’s name. Normally, you will have only one author per piece of content, but in cases when more people collaborate, you can add more authors.

See How to add a new Author.

Note that the Author field is not mandatory for creating and saving a post. If you don’t enter a specific author, the system will assign a default one.

Custom Author

The Custom Author field is used for guest authors who are not part of your organization and you don’t want to create a new author in the system.

Note that when you enter a custom author, the Author field will be automatically prefilled with a default author and you need to tell your front end which one to display.

Status

The Status lets you decide whether the content SHOULD (or not) appear on your website.

The Status box has three options: Active / Inactive / Temporary. If you select “Active”, your content will appear on your website. If you select “Inactive”, your content will be saved as a draft in the system. However, if you select “Temporary”, your content will appear on your site only for a short period of time.

Properties

The Properties field lets creators and system operators determine what properties a piece of content should have. Properties slightly vary for the different content types and we will examine them separately for articles, videos, and galleries.

Articles properties & types

Ads enabled–By selecting Ads enabled, you allow advertising banners to appear in the body of your article.
Adult content–When you select this property, your article will be marked as containing adult content.
Important–When you select this property, your article will be marked as important on your website.
Live–Select this property if you are covering in real-time a match or a press conference.
Sensitive content–Selecting this option will mark your article as containing sensitive content.

Articles and Videos are the only content types that allows creators to define the type of article they are writing (e.g. News, Interview, Commentary, Analysis, Report, Opinion, Advertorial).

Note that while you can select more than one property, you can only select one type and the type options depend on the way your project is set up

Video properties

When you create a video, you can choose from four properties: Ads enabled, Adult content, Important and Sensitive content.

Gallery properties

Similarly to videos, galleries have only properties and you can choose to select from three:
Ads enabled, Adult content, Sensitive content.

Published From/Until

The Published From and Published Until boxes are filled when you want to keep an article on your website for a specific period of time.

Let’s look at two scenarios when this could be helpful:

Scenario one: Ad campaign

If you are running an advertising campaign, you can define the time your ad post will stay on your website. For example, one week.

Scenario two: Embargo

If a football club puts an embargo on a specific topic until an official announcement is made, journalists can’t publish anything about it. But they can prepare their news, upload it to the CMS, and set a publish date for the day and time of the announcement.

Note that when you create an article, if you don’t set Published from, the system will set as default the date of creation. You can always go back and change it.

Distribution Regions

Think of the Distribution Regions functionality as your location filter, and a way to let an audience from a specific region seen your post.

Use the box to enter a country, city, or any type of location tag you have previously created.

Note that you can use more than one region.

Distribution Channels

When you have to decide what distribution channel to decide for your post, think about your audience and where it consumes your content most often–desktop, laptop, iOS / Android device, and so on. This will help you optimize your content for the right channel.

Comment policies

The Comment policies feature lets you control the way users engage with your content in the comments section of your posts. You can restrict, remove, or set any commenting policy you want.

The Media tab is where you upload a Main image for your Аrticles, Videos, or Galleries. The Main image is the image that will appear as a header (or main media) of your content.

Note that regardless of whether you are creating an Article, Video or Gallery, you always have to choose an image to display as main on your website.

Adding main images to posts

To upload a main image for your post, you can either add a new photo(s) or choose from already existing in the system.

To add a new main image, select the Upload new images button.
To choose from existing images, select Toggle already uploaded photos.
To add a description for your image, fill in the Image description field.

It’s worth mentioning that when you upload multiple images, the description you enter will be for the last image.

When you upload multiple images, the last image will be set to appear as main on your website and the rest will be saved in your image library for later use.

The image below is an example of how the main image of an article looks:

Specifics when creating articles, videos, and galleries

Most of the Media tab properties overlap for all three main content types, but the use cases vary depending on the type of content you want to emphasize; be that video, a single image, or a gallery of images.

Main media: Articles

When you write and upload a new article to your website, it normally has a single image (as shown above) as main media.

However, as many different use cases exist, the Sportal365 CMS has the option to also place as main media of your article a short video or a gallery.

To do that, use the Choose Main Media box to search for an existing Video/Gallery to add.

Note that whether you decide to use a video as main media of your article, the emphasis still remains on the quality of the article body, the video is normally short and plays a supportive role.

Articles with video as main media could appear on your website as shown below:

Main media: Videos

When you create videos, the Media tab is where you not only add a main image to your video, but you actually add/create your video.

Note that the image you add as main for your video will be the thumbnail of your video.

To add a new video:

Select Media->Choose Main Media->Embed Video.
Paste the embed code of the video in the Video embed box.

3. As an alternative, you can add a video by using the Search Dugout videos and Search Onnetwork.tv videos options.

Main media: Galleries

You will notice that when you create galleries, the Main tab doesn’t contain the Choose Main Media tab as do articles and videos.

When you create a gallery, the emphasis is on the quality of images in the gallery. Also, if you upload multiple images, the last uploaded image will appear as the main image (opening/header image) of your gallery.

To learn how to create a gallery, see How to create a Gallery.

The Content footer is a property available in Articles, Videos and Galleries. The Content footer is, well, the footer of your post and depending on the way your project is set–you can give photo credit and so on.

And here is an example of how your Content footer could look like:

The Tags tab is where you add one or more tags that you have created to your content. It’s not mandatory to tag your post.

When you tag your post, however, users can easily browse your content by topic rather than chronologically, which is how blogs were set up in the past. Also, tagging improves the optimization of your content for search engines.

Tags are related to the topic you write and are meant to describe specific details of your posts.

So, if you are writing about a potential player transfer, a sample tag you can use is “transfer rumors”. Think of these as your site’s index words. They are the micro-data that you can use to micro-categorize your content.

You can create and add more than one tag to your content. To learn more about tags, see Categorization & organization of content and How to add a new tag.

Tagging with Football Connections

In addition to tagging your content with relevant tags you create, you can tag your articles, videos, and galleries with teams, players, and matches.

Football connections are connected to statistics and you use them to specify to which match, player, or team a certain news article is related to.

When you tag a news article with a football connection, you can use the available data from our Football API to create a page on your website and show all news related to a specific match/player/team.

Note that the process of tagging is the same for Articles, Videos, and Galleries.

The idea behind related content is to connect the article, video, or gallery you are creating to more relevant content. Related content is the additional content suggested to readers at the bottom of articles, videos, and galleries on your website.

How it looks on your website is up to your front-end development, but here’s an example:

The related content you will be able to select and add to your news is directly connected to the football connections you use in the Tags tab.

That’s why if you tag your news with a match (team or player) between Manchester City and Everton, the Related content tab will either suggest or let you search all related news to the match (team or player) you have tagged your news with.

Note that you can either select the content you want to add as related by selecting Suggestions or use the Search to find what you are looking for.

The URLs tab is used mainly by CMS Webmasters to tell search engines what pages of your website to index in special cases such as advertising campaigns and duplicated content.

External URL

An advertising campaign is an example of where external URLs come in hand.

Once the advertiser is ready with campaign preparations, they will send you a URL leading to their promotional page for the webmaster to paste in the External URL box.

This way, every time one of your website visitors clicks on the content you have created, they will be immediately redirected to the prepared by the advertiser page with promotional content, say, nivea.dk/new-lotion

Type of redirect

You can choose from two redirect options for the external URL; Permanent and Temporary.

Permanent

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another.

If you select Permanent in the Type of redirect field, this will always send site visitors to the external URL you have entered in the CMS and tell search engines to index only the page with the external URL.

When using the 301 redirects, your URLs maintain their link popularity because these redirects transfer a page's so-called "link juice" from the old page to the new.

Temporary

If you use a temporary 302 redirect, you tell search engines that you wish to temporarily direct your visitors to a new page, which shouldn’t be indexed.

External URLs and permanent/temporary redirects are a great feature that lets you decide which pages to tell search engines to index.

Canonical URL

A canonical URL is your preferred URL. The canonical URL is a meta tag that allows search engines to index the preferred URL for one site from the multiple URLs available.

For example, you can have five pages with similar content on your site because it serves the needs of your users, but search engines see no value in having similar pages and can penalize you.

The use of canonical URLs helps you tell search engines what specific page to index in cases where you have duplicating or similar content on your website.

Public URLs for desktop / mobile / AMP

Public URLs for desktop / mobile / AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a feature that lets you paste a link to the social media post of your Article / Video / Gallery.

In other words, the links you paste in the boxes here will take you to the Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / Linkedin–depending on how your project is set–post with the Article / Video / Gallery you have created.

The public URL links you paste in the CMS will appear at the bottom of the post on your website.

Optimizing your content for the internet is important because it helps search engines discover, index and offer your content to people searching online.

In the SEO tab, you will find several options to make your content easy to find online.

SEO Title

Use the SEO Title field to write an alternative title for your article, video, or gallery. If you want to keep as SEO title the headline of your content, select Copy SEO title from main title.

SEO description

After you enter an SEO description, it normally goes into the metadata of your page for search engines to scrape and index. However, it’s up to you where else you will display the SEO description. For example, the SEO description can serve as a sub-title of an article.

SEO keywords

The SEO keywords are meta keywords also part of your page data. You can customize your article, video, or gallery by adding existing tags, creating new tags, or directly write words that describe the content you are working on in the SEO Keywords field.

Slug

A slug is the part of the URL that explains your pages' content. Writing a good slug for your page or post can positively affect your SEO because you can insert keywords in your slugs and create user-friendly URLs.

Content creators can write slugs themselves or select Generate automatically from SEO title to automate the process.

Allow indexing

Allow indexing is an option selected by default, which allows webmasters to tell search engines whether or not to index specific news.

Allow following

Allow following relates to the links on a specific web page. By selecting/deselecting this option, you determine whether search engines indexing a web page should also index the links on it.

Lists is a feature that lets creators add the article, video, or gallery they are working on to a list of articles (videos or galleries) grouped under certain criteria to appear in a specific position on your website.

Adding your content to a list is optional but if you decide to do it, go to the Add current article to list Box. Bear in mind that you can do it later as well.

To learn more about Lists, see Categorization & organization of content.

Custom data is a feature that gives CMS users the flexibility to import any type of data in valid JASON format. Users can enter any JASON data, which they can later use through the API in cases such as custom mapping, legacy data, and more.