Getting Started with Composer
Welcome to Getting Started with Composer.One note before we begin—Composer is highly configurable, and your organization’s setup may be different than what you see here. This article presents the most common workflow actions for Composer.
Stories Search Page
When you open Composer, you see filtering options along the left side and story cards to the right. The filters let you search for specific content by website and section, when the story was created, published or last modified, author, headline, source, subtype, and workflow status. Note that these filters are sticky, meaning, the system remembers your last selection until you replace or clear it by clicking Reset filters. The search bar on top of the story cards searches many fields, including body, headline, and description.
Starting a New Story
When you click Create story, you have the option to select one of your Starred Templates, a blank story, a default template (if those are configured for your organization), or to browse all templates in your organization. The benefit of story templates is that they let quickly build the shell of an article with pre-populated fields.
Templates can be helpful for a variety of use cases, such as creating a shell for a weekly column that might have the author, website section, and tags filled out. Or it could be a way to quickly write a sports recap story where the section, part of the headline, tags, and keywords are already populated. It's common to create templates for specific sites, sections, or even authors.
Planning Tab
The Planning tab is where you communicate what your article will be and when it will be ready. Here is a sample of some of the fields you may see:
Circulations - Choose a primary website. For single-site organizations, this field pre-populates with your site name. For multi-site organizations—if the primary website hasn’t already pre-filled from the starting template you selected—you must choose the primary website for your content. If you want to circulate your content to additional sites, you configure those settings on the Circulate tab. The primary website signifies to search engines who the canonical owner of the article is. Some Arc XP permissions also rely on the primary website.
For multi-site organizations, you can choose to set up quick selection groups for easier circulation. Some examples of quick groups are all sports sections across your sites or all politics sections in a certain region. For more information and to configure quick groups, contact Arc XP Customer Support. You can learn more about circulations here: Composer Circulation Selector
Additionally determine the sites and sections where you want to publish your content. For multi-site organizations—if you have the system privileges to do so—you may select more than one site and section to circulate your content to. For each site you choose, you must have a primary section selected. The system uses the primary section to establish the canonical URL for your article.
Authors - Enter the author names. If the author is you and you have an author profile in the system, click Add me. Note that all authors who have an author profile in the Arc system (within the Author Service tool) appear in Composer as Staff, which is a designation within Composer indicating that user has a saved author profile. We encourage your administrator to use the author service Role field to designate employment titles. If you want to add additional authors, type their names in the field. If they have a profile, their name appears; if not, you can add them by clicking Add a guest.
Description - Optionally, enter a brief, reader-facing summary of the article. The description often appears on homepages and section front pages.
Headlines - Add a headline to let your team know what this article is about. You have the ability to change this later.
Planned ready time - Optionally, enter when you think this story will be ready to publish. The planned ready time is for internal tracking through WebSked and does not schedule a publish date. We strongly encourage you to use this field.
Will have - Select the check boxes to indicate what other elements (Photo, Gallery, Video, Graphic) your article will include. Similar to Planned ready time, this field is for internal planning purposes only and does not attach any elements.
Metadata Tab
The Metadata tab is where you see information such as Publish/Display date, Website URL(s), Story tags, Paywall status, Copyright information, and other fields that capture valuable metadata for your organization.
The canonical URLs for your article are automatically created when the article is published. If the headline changes and you need to correct the URL—for example, your original headline stated that three people we injured in a car crash, but now that number is four—you can click Regenerate to create a new URL string and a redirect from the original URL.
Featured Media Tab
On the Featured Media tab, you determine the thumbnail or primary media for your article on the homepage or social posts. By using different media keys, you have the flexibility to determine if you want to use a different primary image (or video or gallery) for your thumbnail and for the main image shown when readers open your story.
The basic media key is the thumbnail media, and it's best practice to always include at least a basic featured media piece for your articles. This basic featured media is also the default image at the top of your article when readers click to open. If you want to use a different image for this purpose, you can use the lead_art media key and add a separate image to appear at the top of your article.
Related Items Tab
The Related Items tab is where you optionally add components, like stories, galleries, videos, and more that you want to appear as related items to your story.
Clipboard Tab
The Clipboard tab displays any items you've added to your clipboard. You can use these items in your story.
Publishing a Story
After you’ve included the fundamental pieces of your article, and you have the proper permissions, you’re ready to publish.
Click Publish in the top left corner of the page, and select the time you want to publish your story. By default, the time is set to Now. The Composer publish window lets you publish a story immediately or schedule it to publish later by clicking the small calendar icon. The publish time is set automatically when the article is published. You may also set the display time, which is the time stamp readers see on the article page. Display time is an editable field, allowing you to adjust this date on the front to accommodate different kinds of edits, like “quiet edits” where you're fixing a typo or something else that you don’t want the time stamp to update versus an edit to the content that you want to alert readers that something has significantly changed in that article.
If the Publish button is unavailable, hover over the button to see the required fields you are missing.
Editing a published article
After an article has been published, notice that the Publish button is replaced with an Update button and, if you have the proper permissions, an Unpublish button. The Save button is still there, allowing you to make edits to the published article behind the scenes. Your readers see only updates to the article. You can schedule an update in the future by clicking the calendar icon on the update page.
You also see that the display time option has now been expanded for updates. This date defaults to a quiet edit, which retains the display date as the same as before. If you want to update that date, which generally updates the time stamp on the front end and potentially brings this story back to the top of front end queries, select the “match display time to publish time” check box.