Represents curated content on a page. One Front has many Containers. A Fronts' containers are configured in the config tool.
A horizontal slice of a Front containing Cards and Treats. One Container has many Cards. The contents of a container are modified in the Fronts tool. The layout/shape of a container is determined in the config tool. This example container also has ‘treats’ in it (weather and daily email sign up on the left hand side):
Containers can contain content that is manually or automatically curated. Manually curated content is added in the Fronts tool.
We can also add content automatically. We can do this by setting the 'backfill' property of a container to add content from a CAPI query when the Front is pressed. The backfill will added content after any manually curated content, up to the card limit of the container, which is hardcoded by the container presentation. The query is set in the config tool. It commonly references a tag, as in this example:
A Card represents a piece of content within a container, which might be an article, or a snap link.
Treats are fixed on the left hand side of a container and typically contain a snaplink – it could be something else, but this would be odd editorial behaviour. They display text but can be customised with html. Edited by going to the config tool and following the 'edit treats' link, which will link to the old Fronts tool (V1):
Treats cannot be previewed.
A Card that isn’t a direct reference to article. This can be:
- A tag page.
- A section page.
- A website.
- A custom bundle of HTML/JS/CSS to display arbitrary content – often Thrashers.
- A link to the latest piece of content for a tag or section page.
As the last item suggests, you also create a ‘latest’ snap for tag or section pages. This displays the latest article available for that tag or section at the time of pressing. ‘Latest snaps’ have also been called ‘dream snaps’ in the past.
Create a snap by dragging a page link (front or tag page) into the fronts clipboard. If the snap represents a web page, the snap will be created immediately. If the snap represents a tag or a section, you will get a prompt:
A 'Latest from' snaplink always displays latest item with the tag e.g. latest quick crossword. A 'Link' snaplink creates a link to the tag page or front.
A Thrasher is a type of container. It's looked after by central production. Thrashers typically contain a single snaplink containing custom HTML/JS/CSS, provided by the Visuals team and hosted on interactive.guim.co.uk. The content is typically long lived.
The graph that appears next to some content to show the number of impressions over time, and the total number of impressions, for each piece of content over the past hour.
The graphs look like this – you'll only see them in production, as they require live Ophan data:
A container with a dynamic layout. However when editorial refer to it they typically mean this layout:
It’s typically used for a breaking news story. Dynamos are rendered differently from other containers. The Cambridge Analytica Files is a dynamo.
A collection of Fronts, associated with a specific platform on a specific day (for example, "Daily Edition on 1st Jan 2024").
"Normal" website fronts don't belong to Editions, because they are read as they are updated. Editions are only for platforms that don't continually update like the website does.
However, an Edition can be re-published if necessary.
A curated product that has a push publication model – it pushes updated content to the world in discrete 'editions' that contain a list of fronts.
Contrast with e.g. web/app Fronts, which publish their content in real time on a container by container basis. Contains all of the Editions for a given publication.
Examples of CuratedPlatforms are the Editions App (currently known as The Daily on iOS and Android) and the Feast App. (At the time of writing, all CuratedPlatforms are mobile apps, but this is not a necessity)
Because an Edition is tied to a specific day (effectively, it's a specific instance), a user needs to be able to create one on-the-fly.
An Edition composes specific instances of Fronts which contain specific instances of Collections.
A Template defines all of these relationships; it's used to generate an "empty" edition.
A Template is a concrete class in the codebase, which is called to perform this generation.
Examples include DailyEdition, AmericanEdition, AustralianEdition, FeastNorthernHemisphere, FeastSouthernHemisphere.
A Template contains all of the information required to built an Edition - therefore, generic information about the
CuratedPlatform to which the edition belongs (represented as a CuratedPlatformDefinition),
potentially platform-specific information (e.g. EditionsAppDefinition),
generic information about the template (represented as a TemplatedPlatform).
This is all represented in Scala by a trait-inheritance hierarchy which is defined under model.editions in app.
Until Oct 2023 when we switched DCR-rendered fronts to banner ads, Containers could contain MPU ad slots between Cards. The MPU is typically 300×250 pixels in size.