Common Terminology

This page was contributed by Tejas Dinkar and Shraddha Kesari

In this document, we explain some of the common concepts and terminology that the Quintype CMS uses.

As a convenience, if you enter the domain of your editor here, then we will convert paths into links for your editor.

https://.quintype.com

Stories

A story is the fundamental unit of content in Quintype. A new one can be created here: .

A story has a lot of metadata associated with it, which will help you render it correctly

Stories are based on a template
Stories are associated with one or many sections. Of these sections, the first one is considered the primary section for things like the canonical URL.
Stories are associated with tags and authors
Stories can have attributes set on them, which helps provide more metadata about the story

The main content of the story comes from the following places

Fields like “headline” and “hero-image” contain most of the information for the header card
Each story is divided into multiple cards, which are further divided into story elements. The story elements together form the body of the story.

For more information on the APIs, please see the Story API

Story Templates

Story types are predefined templates that can be used to write articles of various domains ranging from photo blogs, listicles, video stories, blogs, etc. Story types give a definite structure and a “starting point” to authors when they start writing a story. They also help in predictive analytics. Data can be derived and studied based on audience engagement on various story types for different domains, for example, a photo story on wildlife may get higher engagement than a text story.

A story type may give subtle hints to the behavior of the story. For example, a live-blog may choose to auto-update every 30 seconds.

The list of templates are available can be managed here: .

Sections

Sections are the primary grouping for stories and are very similar to categories in other CMSes. Each section will also have its page, which is generated from the collection attached to the section. Sections can be nested within other sections, to build a tree-like structure of sections.

Sections must be created before stories are created, and can be managed here: .

The first section of a story is referred to as the primary section and will be the one that appears in the canonical URL of the story. If multidomain support is enabled for your account, then the story will be a part of the domain the primary section (or its parent) is linked to.

Authors

An author represents a contributor in the Quintype CMS. Most story related APIs will return an array of authors information, primarily containing their name and profile picture. More details can be obtained from the Authors API.

Cards

Cardification is a new paradigm targetted towards mobile-first consumption of news. Short chunked blocks of content tend to have much higher engagement. Quintype stories are split into multiple cards. Frontend applications can choose to represent these cards visually, allowing users to interact with these cards directly.

Any API request for stories contain the cards that comprise the story in the “cards” field (as an array). These cards comprise the body of the story.

Story Elements

Story elements are the smallest logical unit in the Quintype platform. Each story element represents a single paragraph of text, image, video, or other units of content. Story elements form a card.

The story elements can be found in the “story-elements” field of individual cards.

The StoryElement Component can be used to render an element with Malibu.

Story Element Types

Each story element has a “type”, and optionally a “subtype”. There are currently five major types of story elements, which all front-end applications must support. They are as follows:

text - a paragraph of text
image - an image
youtube-video - a video on youtube
soundcloud-audio - a piece of audio on Soundcloud
title - a title for a card (listicle)
jsembed - arbitrary, unsafe HTML
composite - an element depending on other story elements

Story Element Subtypes

Story elements may also have a “subtype” field, which gives hints on rendering for clients that know how to render the subtype. For example, a jsembed element may have the twitter subtype. Looking at the metadata, you will find the tweet-id of the particular tweet. Clients may choose to render this element as a jsembed, or as a native Twitter element (and provide optimizations such as ensuring that the Twitter SDK is only loaded once).

Collections

Collections are the preferred way to group content and are one of the most powerful features of the Quintype platform. When you create a section in the CMS, it automatically will create a collection for that section’s landing page.

Collections are used behind the scenes in every place that you would group content, including section pages, magazine pages, and even the home page (which is driven by a collection with the slug “home”)

Collections have the following characteristics

Collections have items, which can be stories or other collections
Each item can have some “associated-metadata” on the item, such as the “layout” for presentation.
Each collection can also be annotated with some metadata, such as an entity, SEO information such as a title and OG image, and various attributes.

The list of collections can be found here: . Please see the help documentation for more information on creating and using collections.

Collections can be fetched using the Collection API, and rendered on a page with the Collection Component.

Attributes

Attributes can be attached to either stories or collections are a way of attaching rich metadata to that piece of content.

For example, if you would like to indicate that a certain story originated in the print edition of your publication, you may have a story attribute “fromprint”, with two possible values “yes” and “no”.

Attributes are configured via the admin screen (link below), they can be attached to Stories or Collection via the respective metadata tag.

Story Attributes can have the following types:

Story Attributes can be an array of strings (a simple attribute)
Story Attributes can be an array of entities

To configure the list of attributes and possible values, please click here: .

Entities

Entities are a flexible way to store structured information in Quintype. Each entity has a schema, referred to as the “type” of the entity.

As an example, you may want to link news stories to an entity of type city, indicating which city the story broke in. The city entity may have a field called “mayor”, filled by an entity of type person.

The schema of the entity may have various fields as either mandatory or optional, including fields that link to other entities.

Though Entities can be used for many of the same use cases as simple attributes, entities allow you to provide much more rich data.

Entities can be found in the following places

Stories may return entities in the “tags” field (along with regular fields)
Story Attributes may represent an entity
Collections may be associated with entities
The advanced search API may be used to search across both stories and entities

Currently, you must contact support in order to have a new entity type created. Entities may be created and managed here: .