Article overview

This article explains the key capabilities and concepts you need to know when creating articles in Sportal365.

Articles are more than just text

The Sportal365 CMS is designed to deliver more than text-only articles. The system offers a set of editing tools and features that help journalists optimize and develop their content into rich sports-specific articles.

Article bodies are broken down into blocks, where creators can insert text, but also different types of content, statistical and social media information as supporting materials — videos, image galleries, contextual widgets, statistical data, social media feeds, and more — so their editorial content best meets the preferences of their audience.

See Content optimization and Widget blocks

Articles need three components to be created

To create a new article inside the system, three elements must be in place–a Title, a Category, and an Author. If those three fields are not occupied, you won’t be able to create, save, or publish a new article.

Note that even though articles are rarely published without images, images are not a mandatory component to create and publish articles.

Articles are written and edited in blocks

The body of articles is broken down into blocks, or what we call Blocky. Each block has an editing panel, which allows journalists to polish and develop their content. Blocky lets creators highlight important passages, insert contextual widgets and sports statistics, and combine various types of content within the article body.

Writing in blocks makes the content-creation process easier, and enables native display of content on mobile devices.

Note that you can paste text from an outside source (e.g. Word) and the CMS will automatically break it down into blocks.

See About Blocky.

Articles can be saved as drafts

To make work easier, the CMS saves drafts of your articles. If you start creating a new article, and for some reason, you exit your editing screen–the system saves a draft locally and you can later continue where you left off.

Note that this is only possible when creating new articles; it won’t work if you want to edit an existing one. We did this to preserve your work in cases when several people collaborate on one article.

Articles can be previewed

You can preview articles in two ways.

**Option 1 — From the article library:** Select the preview icon next to any article in your article library.

Alternatively, you can preview your article while you are working on it. Simply select the Preview button next to Save at the bottom of the page.

It’s important to note that since the Sportal365 CMS is a headless CMS, to preview articles the content management system needs to be connected to a front-end setup, i.e. a website.

Articles can be optimized

Each article in the Sportal365 CMS can be enriched using content properties found under the following tabs: **General**, **Media**, **Tags**, **Related content**, **URLs**, **SEO**, **List**, and **Custom data**. These tools help improve content discoverability, support online distribution, and make it easier for readers to find relevant articles on your website.

Please see Content optimization where content optimization tools are explained in detail.

Articles can be used as supporting content in other content types

Once published, an article is saved to your article library, where it can be reused as secondary or supporting content within the body of other content types, such as Videos or Galleries.