NOTE: If you're using Shorthand's Project feature you'll generally want to use a Related Stories section rather than a Collection.
What are Collections?
Collections provide you with a convenient way to manage a group of links that you would like to add to multiple stories (although you don't need to add them to multiple stories). Think of a 'Related content' or 'More stories in this series' section that lists links to other stories.
Each item in the Collection is a link that has the option of being displayed with an image, title, and description. A Collection could be a list of all your Shorthand stories, just a group of stories on a similar topic, or even a mix of Shorthand stories and other pages not made with Shorthand.
A Collection is essentially a list of links that is managed independently of your other Shorthand content like Stories and Projects, and a Collection can't be seen by an audience until it is published and then referenced in a Collection section within a Shorthand Story.
Stories that include a Collection section (even published stories) always show the latest published version of the Collection, in other words, if you update and republish a Collection then all stories that reference that story will also get the Collection update.
Creating a Collection
To create a Collection, go to the Collections page of your dashboard and click the New collection button. You'll be taken to the Collection Settings form, which is how you'll add items to the collection and set the order in which the items will be displayed. You can also add a Name for the collection, which is how the collection will be displayed to you and members of your team on the Shorthand dashboard (e.g. 'Festival stories collection'), and add a Title, which will be displayed at the top of the section to your readers when they view any stories containing the collection (e.g. 'More stories from the festival').
Adding items and publishing the Collection
For each item in the collection you may add an optional image, title, description, and link URL with options for opening the link in a new browser tab and adding a nofollow attribute.
Your Collection Sections will look neatest if each of the images you add to the list is the same size. Square or rectangular images in portrait or landscape orientation are fine. Images need be no wider than 700 pixels.
Continue to add as many stories to the Collection Form as needed. They can be dragged into the order in which you wish them to appear in your stories.
When finished, click the Publish button to go to the Publishing panel where you can either publish to Shorthand's hosting or you can download and host the Collection as you wish.
Note on publishing: If you publish a Collection to Shorthand's hosting, Shorthand will automatically manage the hosting of the file that stores the data for the Collection; you will not enter a domain or URL path and it will be hosted separately from where you publish your stories. If you instead publish by downloading the Collection, you will need to input the base URL where the Collection will be hosted.
Once your Collection is published it's will be available to be referenced from any of your Stories when you create a new section, and the Collection will be shown as a card on your dashboard and can be further edited or shared with collaborators from there.
Adding a Collection to a story
To reference a Collection from within a story, add a Collection Section to the appropriate place within the story in much the same way as adding any other section type. This is where all the stories that you added to the Collection Form will be shown.
The style of the Collection Section within your story is set by a combination of your story theme, the number of stories referenced, and changes made in the Section Options panel (from where you can change background colour and layout style including options to display the items in the collection as a grid or list).
When your story is published, it will show the Collection Section and be automatically updated if you make changes to the Collection Form, without needing to republish the story.
Once published, a story will not list itself in a collection. For example, imagine a collection called 'Our animal stories' that contains links to a story about cats, a story about dogs and a story about rabbits. When the collection section is added to each of those stories, the story about cats will show the collection section displaying links to the dog story and the rabbit story, but not the cat story. The dog story will show the collection section listing the cat and rabbit stories, but not the dog story, etc. This way, your readers won't see links to a story they are already reading. This may not be apparent while you are testing and previewing your story, as it relies on matching the published URL of the story currently being read to the URL listed for it within the collection.
A single Collection can be used in as many stories as you wish. You could, for instance, create a Collection called 'Our latest feature stories' and include it as a section in the bottom of each of your many Shorthand stories. When you publish a new story, you could then modify the Collection Form to list the new story, and when the form is published, all the stories that reference the 'Our latest feature stories' collection will automatically show the updated list of stories, without needing to re-publish each story individually.
Updating a Collection
Once you've published a Collection you can edit or modify it at any time. Once you've made the updates you'll need to republish the Collection, and then every story that references that Collection will automatically show the updates.