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Upcoming Changes to Summaries

No action required for customers

A number of content types have a Summary field.

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Empty text box with the label "Summary"

In the upcoming Buddy release, we are making changes to how Summaries work to make them more consistent across different content types and front-end displays.

What will Change

Now, more content types will have the Summary field, and it will appear in a consistent, user-friendly location within the admin interface. On the live front-end site, content entered in the Summary field will appear in:

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Sites@Duke Pro webpage of News items, with arrows pointing to the Summary text

If the Summary field is empty, no summary text will display in these locations.

News items imported via Feeds have empty Summary fields, so they will not display any summary text in lists by default. However, site editors can always manually add content to the Summary field as needed.

What Will Not Change

The Summary field does not affect Site Search results or List Page text searches, which both display a text highlight based on the specific search query.

There are also some elements, such as a Blog Post List in a 2-column row, that do not display any summary text by design.

a smooth transition with no action required

These changes will happen seamlessly during the Buddy deployment.

To help smooth the transition to using the Summary field more consistently, we will automatically update any Blog Post, News, or Resource item where the Summary field is currently empty. These are the content types most affected by the changes.

We will programmatically copy a selection of text from the Body field into the empty Summary field during deployment. This will ensure each item will display summary text in list views as expected after the update. Currently, many of these items are already displaying a selection from the Body field (as opposed to a Summary field), so end users will not realize anything has changed.

Existing Summary content will not be affected.