Choosing Sections

Sections can be confusing to new Authors and administrators. What purpose do they serve? What’s the difference between “Articles” and “Features”? As with many Slash features, they can do anything the administrator wants. Sections can provide a secondary means to categorize Stories. Within this context, there are at least two useful paradigms for designing Sections.

The first strategy is to define Sections at right angles to the Topics. This allows Sections to divide Stories along different dimensions than the Topics. For example, where a Topic describes what a Story is about, the Section might describe the kind of Story it is. A sports site might have individual teams or sports as its Topics, with Sections such as Interviews, Game Recaps, Opinions, News, and so forth. These can also be reversed, with a Section devoted to each team. Nanodot Topics tend to be particular areas of science and technology, while Sections are Story types: News, Opinion, Question, Research, Reviews, and so on.

The second option is to use Sections to contain related Topics. This can come in handy for sites with a wide range of Topics. A news site with Topics such as Global Warming, Vanishing Rainforests, and Biodiversity could group them together under an Environment Section. This would allow users and Authors to search for and review Stories under these Topics collectively.

These two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Both types of Sections can exist on the same site, though a Story ...

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