How to use the ARTICLES tag

Posted by Peter on 19th February 2010 at 12:03pm
When you create an article for your website you will notice a drop down list of groups to place articles in.

You can use these groups along with the [ARTICLES] tag to create pages like our support page, with lists of articles relevant to that page automatically included within the text.

With some forethought you can set up a number of relevant groups, and with use of the [ARTICLES] tag you can really make the most of your website.

The articles tag syntax is as below :-

[ARTICLES={howmany},MIN/FULL/VER,NAME/CAT,{category}]

{howmany} is simply how many articles you want displaying, set to 0 if you want every articles that matches to display.

MIN : is just the articles title.
FULL : also gives you the time and date the article was written, who wrote it and how many times it has been read.
VER : Same as FULL but also includes the text if available

NAME : uses the next parameter as the name of an author, and this will display only articles by that author.
CAT : uses the next parameter as the name of a category, and this will display only articles in that category.

Example 1

As an example, on the TempleDene site we created a group called “How To” which we use to keep articles like this one together. On you menu we created a Support page then, in the text of that page we included the articles tag something like this :-

[ARTICLES,20,MIN,CAT,How To]

This tag then automatically displays the latest 20 articles from that group (indicated by CAT), updating automatically whenever a new article is published.

For neatness sake we then put that list of articles in a box out.

Example 2

You can also specify articles by a particular author :-

[ARTICLES,5,FULL,NAME,Pete]

You can use the articles tag anywhere on your site, in fact you could even use it within an article, blog post, or in a forum post.