Global Moxie

Question

Can I split articles into multiple pages?

Answer

Yes, with the help of a plugin.

The default installation of Big Medium always displays individual articles on a single page. Without the help of an additional plugin, the only way to spread a single article into multiple pages is by publishing each “page” of the article as its own individual page in Big Medium. You then have to manually add links between pages into the body text or as related links for each page.

Cue the “split pages” plugin

This plugin lets you add page breaks to any page (except for section pages) to spread out the content over multiple pages. A navigation bar is added to the bottom of multi-page articles to allow you to move back and forth through its pages.

The way that it works is that you put ---BREAK--- on its own paragraph anywhere you want to include a page break:

This text will appear on the first page of the multi-page article.

---BREAK---

This text will appear on the second page.

---BREAK---

This text will appear on the third page.

Be aware that when you’re adding a media element (images, documents, pullquotes, etc.) to a page, the ---BREAK--- paragraph counts when you’re counting paragraphs to align the media element in the page.

Single-page articles (pages that do not include the ---BREAK--- text) are not affected by this plugin, and they will continue to display as usual.

Page preview

When previewing an unpublished page, the ---BREAK--- page breaks are left in place so that you can review the entire article in a single page. The page breaks are processed and inserted only after the page is published.

Controlling widget display

The plugin assumes that you might not want to display all design elements on every page of the multi-page article. By default, the plugin displays the following widgets only on the first page:

• <%gallery%>
• <%byline%>
• <%pubdate%>
• <%modified%>

...and displays the following widgets only on the last page:

• <%authorblurb%>
• <%related%>

To customize these settings, edit lines 38-42 of the split-pages.pm plugin file, changing the @FIRST_ONLY and @LAST_ONLY variables to include the widgets that you want to display exclusively on the first and last pages respectively.

#these widgets appear only on the first page:
my @FIRST_ONLY = qw(gallery byline pubdate modified);

#this widgets appear only on the last page:
my @LAST_ONLY  = qw(authorblurb related);

A special plea

Please be respectful to both your readers and advertisers when considering the appropriate context for adding multi-page navigation to your pages.

Personally, as a reader, I don’t like the added friction of clicking multiple links or wading through extra ad-laden pages to complete an article, unless it’s a very long read. As an advertiser, I often see multi-page articles used as a cynical method for artificially inflating page-view stats, increasing CPM fees while often reducing click rates.

Make the web a better place. Be kind to both of these crucial audiences, and reserve multi-page navigation for very long articles that would otherwise have lengthy page loads or other usability issues.

Installation

1. Download the plugin file.

2. Unzip the plugin file to get the split-pages directory, which contains two files: split-pages.pl and split-pages.pm.

3. Set your FTP client to “plain text” or “ascii” mode.

4. Upload split-pages.pl and split-pages.pm to the moxiebin/plugins directory on your server:

   • moxiebin/plugins/split-pages.pl
   • moxiebin/plugins/split-pages.pm

You’re done! Now you can add the ---BREAK--- paragraphs to your pages, and Big Medium will automatically split them into multi-page items.