Ideas for Arc XP

Add the ability to organize story templates, or for users to select their favorites and hide others

As a newsroom admin, I get requests about twice a week to create a new story template for something that would be useful to only a couple of people.  A template would save these people a lot of time and repetitive, wasted work.  But I typically have to decline these requests because the number of story templates is already unwieldy and makes it difficult for users to find what they need.

Here are three different ideas that would address this problem:

  • Allow admins to organize or nest templates by topic -- i.e. Columnists, Newsletters, Alternative story formats, Series, etc.
  • Allow users to "Favorite" the templates they use and either hide or demote the rest in their template picker (similar to the favoriting system on the Arc home dashboard)
  • Enhance Ellipsis settings to allow a more robust show/hide option -- so that I could specify "Show" only to specific user roles (i.e. editor, producer, audience, columnist, reporter.)
    • This idea could also be tied to author service, so that any given template could be shown only to the author(s) whose names are attached to the template in the Author field.  
  • Jessica Parks
  • May 2 2019
  • Shipped
Categories User Workflow
  • Jul 9, 2019

    Admin response

    Hi all, there is planned work for this, but no time frame yet. Working on getting a time frame for it.

  • Attach files
  • Jenny Czaja commented
    14 Sep, 2022 10:05pm

    This functionality has been released as of today in Composer 1.58. We welcome any feedback or questions. Thank you so much!

  • Jenny Czaja commented
    1 Jul, 2022 02:13pm

    Thank you for checking in! This functionality is nearing completion and we're seeking beta testers for August. I will be reaching out to this group of voters after the July 4th holiday to request beta users, or feel free to drop me a line directly at jenny.czaja@washpost.com.

  • Lynda Finley commented
    21 Jun, 2022 09:32pm

    it is now mid-2022 - any update?

  • Jenny Czaja commented
    12 Apr, 2022 09:45pm

    A quick timing update: this work is currently underway and we're targeting a release in mid-2022.

  • Lynda Finley commented
    12 Apr, 2022 07:56pm

    Is there a date for this yet?

  • Jessica Parks commented
    23 Mar, 2021 04:45am

    Can we get an update on this and https://ideas.arcpublishing.com/ideas/SB-I-379? Two years is a long time for something so simple to be "planned".

  • Sara Skinner Cole commented
    29 May, 2020 08:14pm

    Any updates on when this is planned for yet?